ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Well, me for one, but mostly just anecdotes from my disproportionately male and either apolitical or tech right adjacent Indian-American peers. You can see similar opinions being downvoted in reddit threads like this one.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
The aversion to cold water is based on traditional Chinese medicine i.e. the belief that cold drinks will sap your Qi and shorten your life, although I'm guessing that the true reason is that in the past serving hot drinks was a way to prove that you had boiled water for your guests and weren't trying to get them sick.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
It does confuse me a little - as I understand it, all Brazilians, say, are Hispanic, even though they are ethnically diverse and include white, black, indigenous, and mixed-race people.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
And to be extra fair, it's not like Obama ever had a real choice about publicly identifying himself as black. Realistically, given how American society views race, he never would have been able to pass himself off as a white man. 99% of Americans look at him and immediately think "that's a black guy", they don't think "that's a half white, half black guy".
My vague recollection and also this bit by Trevor Noah is that Obama was referred to more often as mixed-race early in his campaign before he was properly accepted by the wider black community. It was certainly also a conscious decision on his part to lean into it, but not one he made as early as say Kamala Harris, who chose to attend an HBCU (the story told among Asian-Americans being that she was too dumb to get into a better school and realized that she could only achieve success by black standards and not Asian ones).
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I believe the exams were scored by officials who had previously passed, except for the highest levels, where essays would be personally judged by the emperor. So for the weed-out stages there was some sort of rubric that over time accumulated increasingly arbitrary standards for how to compose a properly formatted "eight-legged essay," but there was always a bit of randomness based on the emperor's personal whims.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I only got vague answers as to what the actual questions were—something about understanding Confucius' ideas or writing about proper government structures.
The types of questions I know of (not sure which dynasty or level of exam) were something like "Imagine you are the magistrate of [province] during [recent natural disaster]. Describe how you would respond to this crisis and justify your priorities with appropriate quotations from the Five Classics" or "[Oblique reference to a particular geopolitical incident during the Warring States period]. Please discuss."
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I don't see progressive ideology as an existential threat and so have not lifted a hand to fight it. Is not the man who does perceive it as such but does nothing except fume about it in an anonymous forum more spineless than me?
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
If one were to genuinely try, then how does one convince someone who no longer is uninterested, but actively places negative value on your institution, that you are worth preserving?
Let's say you're stuck on a deserted island with a small group and the only one of you who knows anything at all about food preparation is Sylvester Graham. Obviously, most of you are going to hate whatever Sylvester cooks (I'm assuming for the sake of argument that he can't be reasoned out of his position that spices are evil), so what then do you do? You could kill him in his sleep to rid the world of his bland slop, and you would be happy at first, but then you might all starve. Or you could ask him to teach you how to cook and try to figure out yourself which elements are intrinsic to the process and which are just his kooky ideology talking, all the while continuing to eat his terrible food.
For the latter course to be preferable at least two things have to be true: the activity in question must be intrinsically necessary or valuable in some way and the existing gatekeepers must possess some special knowledge that cannot be trivially rederived from first principles in the event that they all drop dead. In the case of Sylvester, perhaps some of you argue that since everyone eats it should be easy enough to figure out how to prepare food on your own, and others argue that only Sylvester knows which plants are safe to eat and which are poisonous and that this is information you can't afford to lose. In the case of the Academy, its defenders would have to make the case that America's economic prosperity is dependent on its activities and that the Trump administration's attacks will harm that capacity in some demonstrable way e.g. capricious defunding of federal grants leads to a mass exodus of scientists to Europe, causing the collapse of the American phamaceutical, chemical, energy, etc. industries because PhD's take years to train and cannot be replaced on a dime.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
It's not so much that they reference older periods in talking about how things are. It's like if Americans talked about the Trump admin the same detached way they talk about the Victorian era. It's all very descriptive. Like I said, it may just be because I'm hearing it from a naturalized American explaining it to a foreigner. But there's also something to a giant mosoleum to a WW2 leader right next to a 1300s mosoleums and treating them both the same.
I suppose it's partially the fact that there are no cities in America old enough for buildings from wildly separated historic periods to be right next to each other, the way you might find a mosque next to Roman fortifications in Istanbul, or a Gothic cathedral next to a brutalist office park in Europe. I would say that Chinese speakers in general tend to talk about things like the government in a more detached way than Americans, seeing the actions taken by those on high as more akin to weather that one has to prepare for than decisions that they have a real say in. The only place this has really changed is Taiwan in recent years, and the transition was something both confusing and unpleasant to the older generations, who view that sort of active participation in a democracy about the same way they do rolling around in the mud with pigs.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I suppose I'm just tempermentally different in some fundamental way from many people here, but despite going through the same Great Awokening experiences as most college-educated individuals with heterodox views, I never felt this crushing sense of repression that others seem to. It has never been more than a minor annoyance to me that I had to attend diversity trainings, disinterestedly listen to whatever my progressive peers have decided to rant about that day, or that I would be mildly discriminated against by college admissions and hiring committees on account of my race(s), and one day in the past few months things seamlessly flipped over and I started being mildly annoyed instead that federal research grants were being canceled on account of including banned words. So it goes.
Perhaps I just never had any naive expectations of fairness, or that things like freedom of speech counted for much in practice, so the fact that I couldn't talk about race or sex differences in public didn't strike me as some sort of betrayal that needed to be avenged. Perhaps I don't have any real principles, and so, like the average person, I have no qualms about passively accepting whatever the ruling ideology happens to be and getting along as best I can without taking a stand for Truth and Justice. Perhaps I spent enough time in the third world that Americans complaining about basically anything at all strikes me as laughable. Whatever the reason, I notice that I am confused by this in the same way I am by the broader "mental health crisis" that has double digit percentages of my generation popping SSRI's like they're candy.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
There is a 9-story pagoda, essentially a Chinese tower, that we stop in to get a good view of Nanjing.
If I'm not mistaken, this was a replica of the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, which was considered by some to be a Wonder of the World before its tragic destruction during the Taiping rebellion (Nanjing sure went through a rough century).
There is something about the Chinese worldview that is still hard for my American brain to grok. They speak about ROC and CPC much the same as they speak of the Ming and Qing. Yat-sen may as well have been an emperor. We're living through another era in a long history.
Even in America this was a common mindset until the 20th century decline in classical education. The Founders spoke of the Greeks and Romans and their forms of government in the same breath as contemporary examples as they were drafting the Constitution, and politicians were quoting ancient playwrights like Aeschylus well into the 60s (e.g. RFK's speech on the eve of MLK's assassination, if I remember correctly), not to mention all the Shakespearean references. I think there's value in participating in a millennia-long conversation about political philosophy, poetry, the meaning of life, etc. and hope we can bring a bit of that attitude back someday.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I've heard more than one Russian nationalist complain that the Soviet Union was run by a cabal of Jews, Balts, and other minorities to the detriment of the Russian majority, but I digress. The implication of the science+smuggled ideology take is that whatever you try to replace the existing order with ought to have the same basic command of the hard sciences in order to be seen as legitimate, and the ongoing attempts to defund and intimidate universities and national laboratories into compliance with the new administration's agenda seem likely to damage that core competency, unless parallel private organizations (i.e. Bell Labs 2.0) are set up at lightning speed to take their place.
If the right were to admit that they simply don't have the "elite human capital," to use Richard Hanania's term, necessary to rebuild the institutions they are currently destroying, then that would make them nothing more than Vandals plundering Rome out of spite. Perhaps the Romans were immoral and degenerate and deserved to be conquered by the virtuous and strong Germanic tribes, but the latter couldn't build an aqueduct or a bridge worth a damn and their civilization was poorer for it.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I remember my dad making a big deal about me "choosing a signature" the first time I got a debit card or something and had to sign it, saying that it would stick with me for the rest of my life. I've not always liked the one I picked then, but I've made my peace with it and even been complimented once.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Why must every border in the world be drawn according to 19th century European nationalist principles? Multiethnic empires, religious caliphates, city-states, mercantile republics, and tribal confederations all existed long before the national revivals of Mitteleuropa and I do not see why they should be considered inherently less legitimate forms of political organization.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Yes, many second-generation African and Caribbean immigrants from an upper middle-class, college-educated background have this personality type, just the same as their peers of whatever race.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Whether it's the Ukrainians, Kurds, Taiwanese, Irish, Palestinians, or (Anglo) Canadians, denying the existence of a people seems like a guaranteed way to conjure one into being or rescuscitate one from the brink of extinction. Few remember or care today, but during the Revolution and the War of 1812 there was a bitter partisan struggle across the St. Lawrence frontier between Patriots and Loyalists that divided families, wiped the Iroquois off the map, and whose brutality shocked the British-born officers sent to take charge of the situation. I for one do not wish to needlessly invite conflict with such people when time was our ally in forging a peaceful economic and political union.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
There have been a number of shifts in the common definition of "white" (which has occasionally gone by other terms like "WASP")
I don't think WASPs ever self-described as such. My (boomer WASP) relatives tell me that they had never heard the term until they went to college in the 60's, where it was used in a half-joking, half-derogatory sense by their Jewish classmates i.e. "we have a slur for every other group, so we need one for you guys too." "Anglo-Saxon" was definitely used in the past, but it wasn't meant to imply that non-Anglo-Saxons weren't white (yes, Ben Franklin once wrote the 18th century equivalent of a Twitter shitpost arguing this position, but I've never seen any other evidence that this was a widespread opinion in his day or afterwards).
I sometimes wonder if we'd all get along better if we actively tried to culturally expand that definition to include all Americans, rather than focusing on divisive "hyphenated Americans" (a term which dates back to the late 1800s). But it seems an unpopular idea in political activist circles.
Calling everyone white would be needlessly confusing when we already have the word American. Sure, Spanish-speakers and heritage American ethnic nationalists will be upset that we aren't conforming to their definitions of the word, but this is already how 90% of the population is using it so at this point it's just descriptive linguistics.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
My mom was an elementary school teacher, and her general experience was that you can teach bright kids all sorts of ways, and it will mostly work out eventually.
When I first heard about this debate over teaching methods, I asked my parents how I learned to read, because I couldn't remember anything other than some frustration when I first went to school that some of my classmates didn't know the alphabet yet. Apparently they read to me but made no other effort to instruct me on the subject, and one day I just started reading the books back to them, having either figured it out on my own or having committed them to memory was simply miming the action of looking at and turning the pages. Which is to say, I still have no idea how I learned to read.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Was human sacrifice widespread among American Indians? And did most of them really eat your internal organs after raping your children?
Large-scale human sacrifice requires a certain population density and organizational sophistication that with a few exceptions, such as the Mississippian culture centered at Cahokia, did not exist north of the Rio Grande. There were certainly individual sacrifices as part of religious rituals in many tribes similar to those in Celtic and Norse Pagan societies in pre-Christian Europe, but it's not the first thing that comes to mind when describing any of those cultures the way it is for Mesoamericans that lined up thousands of war captives to cut their hearts out and build racks of their skulls.
As far as treatment of captives goes, torture, rape, and being sold into slavery were par for the course in the pre-modern world, so in my book Enlightenment-era Europeans deserve recognition for being more civilized than their contemporaries, while everyone else gets a "that's just how things were back then" pass. There's also the fact that British colonists only started encroaching on Indian territory in force after an apocalyptic series of pandemics had swept through and caused many of them to regress to a more barbaric state than they were at prior to European contact. This is most clear where we can read the accounts of sixteenth century European explorers who describe seeing densely populated farming villages with impressive fortifications and richly adorned chieftains in the same locations that eighteenth century explorers observed only a few isolated savages in loincloths hunting deer in the woods. In that situation there are fewer guardrails against individual acts of sadism or depravity.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I very much doubt that any two humans alive today are distant enough genetically that their offspring will be biologically better or worse off purely by dint of being mixed-race. We aren't talking about Neanderthals or Denisovans here, where hybrids appear to have been less fit and many of their genes were disproportionately selected against over time.
There are clearly psychological differences (presumably with genetic correlates) associated with the kind of person who is more likely to marry outside their race, as well as environmental factors i.e. how mixed children are treated by their peers growing up, and these seem sufficient to explain whatever characteristics might at first glance seem to be the results of the mixing itself.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Yes, but I would rather deal with hypocrites who claim to be on the side of truth and logic than with honest conflict theorists, because with the former there is an opening, however small, to engage intellectually, while with the latter there can be only war. Obviously both sorts exist on either side and we may disagree on their proportions, but to me it seems clear that the median woke progressive is more of a hypocrite (based on revealed preferences when it comes to lifestyle, the neighborhoods they move to, etc.) while the median dissident rightist is more of a conflict theorist.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
The New Kingdom of Egypt, which lasted for 500 years, is often considered a golden age. China has also experienced multiple 100-200 year long periods of relative material prosperity and cultural productivity during the Han, Tang, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The Gupta Empire, called the golden age of India, lasted over 300 years, and the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan lasted 268 years.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
In addition to their historical lack of access to their own fisheries, the fact that Ireland remains relatively underpopulated to this day as a result of the Great Famine meant that there wasn't the kind of Malthusian pressure to exploit every available food source that existed in places like Japan. However, certain kinds of seaweed (dulse and Irish moss) are considered part of the traditional Irish diet and are seeing a resurgence in popularity nowadays alongside other more quotidian sorts of fish and shellfish.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
The descendants of a race that invented wheeled transport, domestication of horses, and then conquered/colonized virtually the entire world, and then invented pretty much everything else in history, does have a spark of Main Character Energy that fundamentally lacks in a race of eternally subjugated rice peasants.
The pedant in me feels the need to point out that half of China grows wheat, not rice. Interestingly, there is some evidence that the psychological differences observed between wheat and rice farming societies are not deeply rooted and are subject to change on the scale of one or two generations, but I digress.
As far as the relative achievements of these two peoples in the grand scope of human history, I think it's entirely possible that Europe and her children will be devoured by the consequences of their own philosophical and technological creations, leaving Asia to pick up the pieces and integrate them into some sort of sustainable paradigm. Who then is superior, the tragic genius driven to suicide or his diligent successor without whom his ideas would be lost to history?
When I was taking piano lessons, my teacher showed me a video of a Japanese 4 year old playing that Clementi Sonatina and dared me to do better. At the time I was infuriated to be shown up by a toddler, but it's probably the reason I still remember and enjoy the piece.
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