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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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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?

Is your selective rafa-memory acting up again? As I recall, they were of the opinion to just let old people die. I had the opposite, now rescinded, opinion. Although in the face of uncertainty having the pro-lockdown opinion wasn't as erroneous as it was for later proponents.

I don't think I'm being selective here, I think that you and others have chosen to forget.

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I think you're misinterpreting me? I'm saying that actually trying zero covid and claiming the great leap forward was a stroke of genius isn't an improvement over hiring some unqualified black women and letting them bloviate about race.

Saying that "one is not an improvement on the other" implies that they are equivalent, so no i don't think I've misinterpreted you.

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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.

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