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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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You were warned the last time you engaged in literal Chinese cardiology that you are allowed to develop weird theses, but it can't just be cherry-picked examples of why your target group is bad.

Do we realy have to litigate this one?

Yes, if you are going to offer anecdotal observations as "evidence" that the Chinese are lizard people, you have to actually justify your just-so stories.

This kind of manifesto-posting is not desirable. Lots of people come here with very particular ideas about certain racial and ethnic groups, and as you are no doubt aware, we don't prohibit that, but you actually have to make a well-founded argument, not just "Look at how obviously alien and inhuman these people are." We have rules against weakmanning, and rules about writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

Just to take an obvious example, we have several posters with very obvious antipathy for Jews. Yet when they go off on their favorite topic, they usually manage to post in such a way that there is at least something to engage with, it's not just "Jews bad." Complaining about Holocaust memorials or the amount of dollars that go into funding Jewish NGOs might be a veneer over their real agenda, but it's a veneer that allows even Jewish posters to argue at the object level.

What you offer a hypothetical Chinese poster to engage with is "true or false, you are an alien bugman of a hostile alien species."

Since you were already explicitly warned to stop posting like this, banned for three days. If you want to come back and keep riding this hobby horse, you will need to seriously up your game.

I'd like to make a meta-comment here; I got this thread in the daily volunteer janitorial duties. Without context, I see consensus building, cherry-picked (though not insufficient) evidence to support his claims -- No Chinese-Americans are not just high IQ whites seems to be the one real claim of the entire post, which the subsequent evidence feels so disconnected from I almost forgot about it --, vague weakmanning.

That said, on a quick read, and without seeing his name, it wasn't even clear to me whether he was pro or anti East Asian. The first two sections seem to suggest that the babies are a lot tougher/more stoic than Europeans, not a priori a negative trait. The last section, without context, could read as evidence of East-West cultural incompatibility or discrimination. Initially, when reading the title, I thought he was going for Chinese don't just have higher IQs, they are more resilient/industrious in general. This falls apart in the third section, where he's hammering the trope of East Asians = seen by Westerners as emotionless/cold/disconnected, which I think vaguely passes muster? There's considerable asymmetry in general cultural exports between East Asia and the US after WW2/Korea.

He's begging the question with Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?, but taking a step back, my main exposition to Japanese/Chinese culture has been self-sought (barring reading Sun Tzu when I was a young teenager, who's become a ubiquitous prototype of eternal Eastern wisdom) and entirely autochtonous. I've briefly perused top 25 best books in Asian-American literature and don't recognize a single title (except for a Murakami book, whose inclusion I find borderline offensive).

I believe I rated this as Bad, maybe an extremely charitable Neutral, but I feel this showcases a shortcoming of the hyperlocal view the volunteer system offers: not only am I unable to immediately view his previous posts (which in my opinion are significantly easier to classify without context) -- they are two clicks away, context then profile --, but am also not necessarily aware that this is a toned-down/more indirect version of the usual manifesto, for which he was already warned.

I feel obligated to point out that Haruki Murakami is not Asian-American, he's just Asian (Japanese).

As for the meta-comment, @ZorbaTHut can comment further if he wishes, but I think it's by design that volunteers only judge posts in isolation, since it's just meant as a sort of triage system. I don't think the volunteer janny system is ever meant to replace moderators, because the mods see user histories and take that into account.

Adding to the meta comment: it would be nice when jannying to be able to go and see the context of a post, and then be able to give an opinion.

At least for me (on my telephone), if I leave the janny page for any reason, I forfeit the volunteering for 24h.

Tap the three dots below the post, hold the "Context" option which appears in the pop up and tap "Open link in new tab". At least that is how I do it on firefox on android.

Thanks! (I'm feeling rather embarrassed for not having found out myself)

I feel obligated to point out that Haruki Murakami is not Asian-American, he's just Asian (Japanese).

"whose inclusion I find borderline offensive" I wasn't offended at the quality of his writing :P

Thanks. I could've sworn that this exact nonsense about Chinese babies was seen before on here, but I wasn't about to hunt down proof. I didn't engage either time because I'm not even sure what the point to all this is.

He doesn't seem to participate otherwise so it was just a profile check to see.

This kind of manifesto-posting is not desirable

It's not even a manifesto. The last time it was more well-formed but also fell short of our classical manifestoposters. It's «here are some reasons I find compelling to think that the Chinese are, essentially, yucky emotionally stunted robots. Amirite?» He suggested some racial struggle, but what's the struggle? Chinese babies are significantly more chill than other babies; Chinese adults tend to wear masks, excel at technical competence and fail at entering the PMC; a hundred years ago, Mainland Chinese elite women had their feet bound. Okay, I personally buy all this and much more.

Where's the thesis and its development? What is supposed to be or not be litigated, exactly? That a sovereign Chinese state is inherently a threat to Western values or something? This doesn't follow from the provided evidence, such as there is, and isn't even articulated.

Maybe I just lack the context of the Yellow Menace discourse and it's assumed to be self-evident the moment Chinese differences are established. I can certainly see how an intuitive antipathy for a racial Other can inform policies. But this is supposed to be a place for rational-ish discussion. You need to spell this stuff out.

I wish there was a Yellow menace. If I was to choose between the current woke pmc and ccp leadership I wouldn't blink before choosing them.

Are you really that bullish on the CCP after 2 years of zero-covid and rolling lockdowns? A consistent pattern over the last 3 years seems to be, America is retarded, but they consistently get outdone by the rest of The World. Russia started a full-scale war, China did zero-covid, Australia/NZ tried zero-covid, Canada went full authoritarian, Germany phased out nuclear... to go back to coal! The UK's economy stagnated. So many other countries got on the lockdown train. And the Third World, they are going to need a lot of IMF loans soon.

Yes. CCP Don't want to export their values unlike Brussels or Washington and them being the hegemon will allow to solve the two biggest problems facing EU - mass migration and inability of current migrants to culturally assimilate. Which requires some mild application of the stick not only the carrot.

CCP Don't want to export their values unlike Brussels or Washington

Are we sure about that? Sure, China may not necessarily be interested in International Communism, but they seem to like asking their business partners (NBA, Disney, etc.) to make the right noises and not make the wrong noises. China's investments in African nations is also likely for a similar reason, to shore up international PR and UN support for the PRC.

Maybe it's just that being the hegemon requires or results in values spread--maybe material power is not enough without memetic power.

I suppose Dase could repost that Russian "proverb" about the two chairs here...

Something something two chairs but one ass? Now sure how that applies here.

While I cannot know for certain, I think @HalloweenSnarry references the classical Prison Riddle, i.e. a shit test used as part of a «registration» rite for a new cell mate, popularized on Russian imageboards (this stuff was recently brought to the attention of Westerners by Galeev).

The riddle in question is a near-perfectly polished psychological attack against a relatively powerless newcomer in a honor culture setting; it's really pretty crude, but lazily googled translations are lacking, so here goes. «There are two chairs. On one, sharpened pikes. On the other, jerked [erect] cocks. On which one do you sit, on which do you put your mother?» As is common with riddles, it rhymes.

Supposedly, default passwords are:

  1. «I'll take the sharpened pikes, cut down the jerked cocks, will sit myself and sit my mother».

  2. «I'll sit on the pikes and sit my mother on my knees».

In principle, the universal counter «For what reason do you inquire?» (literally), or some blah like «We're fine with standing, thank you very much» are also valid, though I haven't had the opportunity to try it out.

There is a whole family of those riddles, sadly their charm is untranslatable. The most reductionist one is «Offer your ass vs. sell your mom?»

I like the trolley problem one:

You're on a train, chained to levers that can turn either left or right. There's a fork in the road ahead - your mother is tied to a pole on the right and your buds, ten of them, are on the left. Which way do you turn, who do you hit?

Answer: today's buds [could be] tomorrow's cops.

Russian (and broader Russophone) culture pays a lot of attention to the problem of choosing between terrible options and false dichotomies, captured in the saying «horse-radish ain't sweeter than radish». E.g. the Escobar Axiom of Choice (Escobar is a Ukrainian black metal character):

In any choice between only two mutually exclusive and opposite entities, both alternatives will be exceptional fucking shit.

Or in the original form:

«this [one] is fucking shit, and that one is fucking shit. Both fucking shits are such that I just fuck her mom's mouth».

Pelevin has developed this idea into a faux-dialectical method, e.g. in «Batman Apollo»:

– The Chinese Taoists, – he said, – had a similar notion, I will retell it in my own words. Struggling for hearts and minds, discourse workers constantly demand that people answer 'yes' or 'no'. All human thinking must flow, like an electric current, between these two poles. But in reality there are always three possible answers: "yes", "no" and "fuck you". When too many people begin to understand this, it means there is some wiggle in the skulls. In our culture, it has reached a critical point. It needs to be reduced drastically.

And earlier, in «P5: farewell songs of the political pygmies of pindostan»:

Ludwig Wittgenstein had claimed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that he had discovered a general form for describing the sentences of any language. In his view, this universal formula accommodates all possible signifier constructions – just as the infinite space of the universe accommodates all possible cosmic objects.

"That there is a general form of sentence," writes Wittgenstein, "is proven by the fact that there can be no sentence whose form cannot be foreseen (i.e., constructed). The general form of the sentence is: "The issue is so und so" ("Es verhält sich so und so").

However, philologist Alexander Sirind, an associate professor at the Irkutsk Pedagogical Institute, recently managed to disprove the famous formula, by giving an example of a sentence that goes beyond the all-encompassing paradigm outlined by the Austrian philosopher. It goes like this: "Fuck you, Wittgenstein".

But as for the CCP vs the Globohomo, I think another piece of imageboard fancy is more relevant – the 4chan «freedom is best, and hard choices» or maybe the Ben Garrison remake «the march of tyranny». If you don't have negotiating power except in the form of defecting in protest, and your defection threshold is only reached after both tyrants have curtailed freedoms of their subjects, just to a different extent (and that's still a better case than what we have here) – eventually both tyrants converge to absolute dominance and all subjects are maximally debased.

The Chinese Taoists, – he said, – had a similar notion, I will retell it in my own words. Struggling for hearts and minds, discourse workers constantly demand that people answer 'yes' or 'no'. All human thinking must flow, like an electric current, between these two poles. But in reality there are always three possible answers: "yes", "no" and "fuck you". When too many people begin to understand this, it means there is some wiggle in the skulls. In our culture, it has reached a critical point. It needs to be reduced drastically.

This reminds me of older discourse around powertalk(?), wherein enough people "leave" the game of producing to extort producers, that society begins to collapse. (I only briefly leafed through a decade ago and current perusal leaves me uncertain whether that was the source.)

I know that this is the premise of Atlas Shrugged, and Zvi's Maze Sequence goes there as well.

Yeah, that first one was what I was thinking of.

Your ending paragraph puts things a lot better, though.

There are two chairs. On one, sharpened pikes. On the other, jerked [erect] cocks. On which one do you sit, on which do you put your mother?» As is common with riddles, it rhymes.

Password template seems to be any solution where you don't sit on the cocks and your mother is absolutely unharmed/uncocked. I did figure that out as much, but thought of retarded shit like placing the chairs sideways and both of us sitting on the side edge or something. I might just be too "neurodivergent" for Russian prison. That fails the "fuck you" criterion though.

Exactly, I’d rather continue to take mandatory DEI trainings than be under the CCP.

‘Lies about how awesome Mao is’ are not a significant improvement on ‘lies about how awesome black supremacists from the 70’s are’.

It's not "the lies" that are the issue.

Pretending to think that declaring war on sparrows and killing 100 million people was a stroke of genius doesn't seem like a notable improvement on pretending to believe that black women have some kind of unique insight.

Simply put, I find the fact that you think that to be illustrative.

Have we really forgotten how vocally "pro-lockdown" theMotte was back in Q1 of 2020? All the lamentations from Darwin, Cimafara and others about how "unfortunate" it was that western governments seemed to lack the political will to weld people into their homes or engage in mass arrests/executions to curb the spread of Covid?

Are you really going to try to argue that mandatory DEI training constitutes a greater evil than Concentration Camps, the Great Leap Forward, or involuntary organ harvesting?

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Why? I feel the exact opposite way.

You’d rather take mandatory trainings on the party? Wear a loyalty pin?

For me zero COVID alone would be a nightmare. Hong Kong just dropped their mask mandate last week!

I suppose if I have to be ruled by tyrants, I'd much rather have the ones that don't change the rules constantly and look to permanent revolution.

At least with the CCP, you know what you're getting.

The sense of unity though, of everyone of any religion, ethnicity and political persuasion coming together - from all over the world - to fight Winnie the pooh and friends, it would be such a relief.

Just think - no wondering if that person I just met at work is a monster obsessed with killing black/white people - not having to wonder about anyone who isn't Chinese at all at the start (not to mention how much easier it would be to score a cute Chinese girlfriend when everyone is terrified of them - sure you can spy on me sweetie, I know less than nothing). It sounds like bliss.

Note that I read the scenario here as things are exactly the same as they are now but the ccp are in charge, and people aren't saying they wish the last 20 years were rewritten so that the ccp steamrolled the world and everywhere now looks like China, because I can't imagine either IGI-111 or Lizzardspawn going for that based on previous conversations, and because that would require a lot more set up to engage with hypothetically.

Yeah I don't think anyone saying they would love to be under the ccp lived in a place that "took covid seriously", my country dropped their mask mandates mid-2022, by god I was going insane, if I was in China where they have stricter covid rules and lockdowns, I would have probably jumped out of the window by now.

US Red State residents have no idea how good they had it the last two years.

My favorite part was where he implied that 3-chord overproduced popular music is better than classical music.

Better or worse is purely subjective in art. I won't call pop music the pinnacle of music, but I personally would rather listen to pop than to classical music.

Yeah popular music is trash. East Asians contribute (or at least K-pop and J-pop do), but it's just more slop.

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