TiltingGambit
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User ID: 804
TiltingGambit
2mo ago
I think I'd say that even if media comes second, it's a major force multiplier. You can have 500 guys in a city who all really want to fight ICE. But the NYT seal of approval turns that 500 into 50,000. Legacy media retains the prestige to set the ethical tone of these kinds of things, despite having fuck all readers. And their power to endorse or condemn movements is what matters to a lot of these protest groups. Most of protesting is signaling, and purely signaling. You need to be confident you're on the right side, and you need a third party you trust to make that clear. Prestigious media organisations can still act as those arbitrators.
The broader media campaign in this context is itself a product of structural insurgent groups. Even if the nature of the media insurgent groups is different from the whistle-blowing groups, that itself is consistent with the nature of those GWOT networks-of-networks.
Yes I agree. Which is why I'm saying the number one problem these types of anti-insurgency campaign need to deal with is that media campaign. You can tell everybody ISIS is evil because they are, and they relish in that. Working out how to do that with "save the whales" guys, who project via media that they're just trying to stop a hispanic mother of 5 from being deported is a very hard problem.
TiltingGambit
2mo ago
I started my career in Afghanistan. I don't have anything interesting to say except that the problem in both cases was the media. There was never a genuine kinetic threat that would cause the Coalition to fail. The coalition was winning by denying the Taliban access to wealthy cities. There was no reason the deployment couldn't have become a low intensity denial of movement operation around key population hubs indefinitely. But the media called it the forever war and assumed it had to end one day (plenty of occupations don't, actually, end).
If you're interested in reducing risk of civil war you need to deal with the media. If you can't deal with the media you can't reduce risk. How you deal with it is a whole other problem. But I'm of the opinion every single military/government operation needs an extremely robust media strategy, treated like a win condition. Because we keep losing winning wars due to hostile media reporting.
The surge worked in Iraq. We were preventing Afghan women from entering a lifetime of servitude in Afghanistan. And ICE is enforcing a federal (but unpopular) law. And all three of these have been defeated by the media.
Governments need to realise that without media support these operations will fail.
The WO who posted that tweet is a shooter. He wants to go shoot high value targets (figuratively I hope) in the anti-ICE protests. He needs to recognise that this isn't the path to victory. The structural insurgent groups he believes are forming are a problem. But they're a second order effect of the broader media campaign that is rallying these groups under a banner. Just like ISIS, young people are vulnerable to these types of calls to arms.
TiltingGambit
2mo ago
I suggested that employers are required to check working rights a few threads ago. It's what Australia does. Australia has approx double the "born overseas" population of Germany, the UK or the US. But we also have pretty unforgiving policy towards illegal immigration or even asylum-seekers (until proven that they are somewhat legit). Overall, I really believe these two policies (ruthlessly preventing illegal immigrants entereing + making sure everybody one meets in polite company has had an accountant or government bureaucrat check their papers) are why immigration is mostly a non issue in Australia.
Aside from this costing businesses more in wages, nobody really had an objection.
going after the employers is the best and only reasonable way to do anything about illegal immigration
As above, when implemented properly I think you need both. Australia sends asylum seekers to off shore detention facilities and don't let them set a foot on the mainland until they have been verified (this has been moderated a bit: we have onshore detention for low risk persons, e.g mums with 2 kids who aren't going to disappear the day after the hand cuffs come off).
But I do think this is a really good policy. It means that:
- the individuals themselves have to keep their documentation up to date, or they stop getting paid. Out of date paperwork seems to be one of the major problems in the US right now.
- the individuals have less incentive to immigrate unless they personally know who/how to find who will pay them under the table
- there is a distribution of responsibility for ensuring people in country are supposed to work there. The government is doing it's checks, but Thompson from HR is also tracking Visas in a spread sheet.
- politically viable: you are promoting jobs for americans.
So what's your objection?
TiltingGambit
2mo ago
Nah man. I think you're just used to it.
TiltingGambit
2mo ago
Do you say "celsius" every time you do?
Lol of course not. My GF literally said "it's 43 tomorrow" 2 mins ago.
TiltingGambit
2mo ago
I'm from Australia. We talk about the heat too.
TiltingGambit
2mo ago
Celsius degrees are too far apart and tenths are too small.
There is no way you can start with "objectively better" and end up with this lol. You're talking about a half degree of difference. My aircon works in denominations of .5. If you have a preference for 18.5 degrees, there's no limitation on this if you use Celsius.
TiltingGambit
2mo ago
I'm not american, a conservative, or pro-guns, but that's not what happened. He interfered with the law enforcement, got into a physical altercation and got shot in the confusion.
He didn't exactly walk up to police, let them know he was armed, allow them to disarm him and then enquire about what was happening.
If you're carrying a gun while dealing with police you are on a speedrun up the escalation of force. If you don't work to slow down that continuum you're putting yourself at risk.
You can be abiding by all known laws and still be lawfully shot. It's not an execution and it's not necessarily the police's fault that you got shot.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
However with Farenheit, 0-100 is basically, human habitable range. 0 is dangerously cold, 100 is dangerously hot. With Farenheit, 1-100 are basically every day weathers around the globe and in every day life describing your freezer up to your body temperature. Meanwhile 40-99 C are nearly useless.
You do not use 100 points of precision to tell the weather.
Like the other guy said, everybody just recognises like 3 to 5 ranges of temperature for the weather. Very cold, cold, light jacket, t shirt, very hot.
Do you think you need a much wider range of numbers to work this out? You don't, and in practice nobody does. They just snap-lock certain ranges to be relevant.
Celsius is definitely intuitive and a metric system more broadly works better on the whole.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
would be to get more leftists working in law enforcement.
No I agree that this would solve the problem you're describing, and I think it's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard of before.
But operationally, how do you encourage e.g. lefties to go to police academy or righties to go to the department of fairness and equality (or whatever).
Institutions bust their ass to get e.g. women into the police and they can't really make it happen.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
You consistently conflate «culture» in the broad sense and something like «soft power/media exports/arts/presentation/aesthetics/charisma».
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
"a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, attitudes, and habits of the individuals in these groups"
It's not conflation. It's just what culture is. When I say French culture is baguettes, being snooty, smoking, and design agencies nobody is arguing. When I say Chinese culture is being shit at diplomacy, making high speed trains and doing propaganda stuff (and, especially, failing to communicate much of anything else about their culture) it's directly comparable.
But we can sidestep the debate about essentialism and focus on specific domains
I'm frankly not interested in that. And never was. You had an issue with me saying Chinese culture is uncharismatic. I was speaking broadly for a reason. You can go through and pick all these examples e.g. EVs, and tell me that proves I'm wrong. But I already took the trick. On the aggregate, on the whole, you know I'm right. We get Japanese culture. We get Singaporean culture. We get Russian culture. We get indian culture. Even when we don't get force fed their media every day, I can genuinely imagine the day to day of an Indian businessman. I don't love their cultural outputs, but I do feel like India has transferred their culture to the wider international audience in a way that makes me feel, to an extent, a sense of Indian culture. Same goes for the Turks, Persians, Danes or Germans. Most people will not have this sense for China or Chinese people.
A normie on the street isn't going to be talking at length about DeepSeek. I have no idea why you keep bringing this up as the critical point in all of this. It's such a bizarre line to take as a holistic defence of China.
The best summary a person on the street will give, even a well informed one, is that China makes iPhones and has a pretty evil, or something, government.
The dimensions of culture that I find interesting are consequential even if literally nobody outside of China except me pays attention.
That's my fucking point! You might be interested in it, but as I said from the start, nobody else is. This is interesting because China is an economic super power, and has 1.7bn people who nobody knows anything about. I just cannot understand what you're not getting here. How many different ways can I say it. I'm not saying China has no culture, obviously. I'm saying the fact that nobody knows about it demonstrates a serious lack of appeal.
I'd go so far as to say that this idea you stubbornly return to, that Chinese culture needs to earn anyone's attention by means of virality and appeal
No buddy. You don't get to do that. This is a terrible conversation tactic that only stupid readers will be fooled by. I am not stubbornly returning to some irrelevant point. That is my point, and you are the one who continually tries to divert the conversation away from it. You responded to me. You don't get to say I'm ponderously returning to some side point when you directly engaged with it, lost the argument immediately, and have since been trying to obfuscate everything with a mental boom laced series of posts that mostly come back to "well that doesn't prove anything!"
So olive branch recinded, I don't like this no progress back and forth, or the completely unearned air of dismissal. You should have called it when you got caught out on me not being American, because it's been downhill since then.
The media is so vulnerable to this kind of shit though. Hamas explicitly has a defensive policy that baits Israelis into bombing an apartment block full of kids. Media: "israel bombed an apartment full of kids".
Protestors do everything they can to stress law enforcement into fucking up: "police kill protestor".
Zero accountability or culpability to those who deliberately create the confusing circumstances that result in these things going wrong. But an absolute demand for complete and perfect performance that transcends any fog of war from the authorities.
When the media can't honestly engage against their preferred social groups you have a major asymmetry that most neutral readers just don't ever think about.
Obviously if you don't want to get shot or have your children bombed, the onus is in you to control what you can, rather than bizarrely expect that the powers that be cowtow to you.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
Interesting, but in practice this would be super hard and cause major problems for some institutions.
How are you going to get a 50:50 split in the police or military? Do you really want aome of these organisations to reflect the voter base, rather than the base of people who want to work in that field?
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
I think you're arguing for the sake of it. You know what I mean, and you know why I'm saying it. I'm satisfied that "Chinese nerds can easily VPN lol" and "Chinese engagements with the rest of the world stink" can coexist in the same framework.
Tbh, my personal experience with Chinese gamers in online games is that nobody likes them. Particularly them. So that goes towards my point too, but that's an n=1.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
The average westerner of the 60s-90s probably had an idea of what they thought a Japanese man was like. Hard worker, very strict workplaces, dedicated to the company, etc. Strage customs, nice furniture, small apartments. Tokyo, bright lights, (possibly??) crazy night life?
I'd say, whether that was an accurate description or not, the Japanese culture had endorsed that meme. And that helps create a cultural story that outsiders can read.
If you asked a normie what an average chinese guy is like, I just don't think you get any of that. In 10 years? 20? Yeah it's probably a different story.
My dad in the 80s could probably go out with an Italian, a Japanese, a Singaporean and have some expectations about each of them. I don't think Mr Thompson from accounting could go out with a Chinese guy, today, and have much of a head start at all.
It's weird because obviously Chinese economics have arguably caught up to the west. But they haven't exported the chinese identity. If anything, which is my main point, they've damaged chinese identity with bungled attempts to insert themselves into it.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
Chinese media isn't interested in getting money from foreigners, when theres 1.4 billion people domestically.
Yeah businesses are notorious about their lack of interest in breaking into new markets with high disposable incomes.
All jokes aside, it's not like they don't try. They do. Sometimes successfully. But more frequently not. Which is a summary I could use for virtually all Chinese interactions outside of China.
supermarket sandwiches
I'll check them out.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
The great firewall is one way restricting Chinese from accessing google or facebook, they've got wechat and bilibili and xiaohongshu. Nothing stopping you from shitposting on XHS to see whats up there, mainlander degeneracy is pretty top tier brainrot that doesn't need translation to understand.
Can you make a basic effort to understand what I'm saying?
To put it more succinctly, China has very little cultural impact on the world. And in the few mediums that they try to, it comes off poorly.
If your answer is to log into billbill or xiaohongshu to experience chinese culture, you're making my point for me. Nobody is doing this. Normies have no idea what you're even talking about.
"Just go talk to them". I don't "just go talk to" Americans. American culture is so pervasive that I organically experience their culture daily, passively.
assigning population level mystique is a category error
I can't scroll on this forum without being blasted with "Europeans are pussies lol". I have no issue saying "chinese culture is uncharismatic" when it's a model that describes why Chinese politics, diplomacy and cultural engagement largely fails. I can say it when nobody outside of the Chinese political elite actually really know whats going on in china.
Seriously, its like none of you guys here whining about China or Chinese people actually met anyone based in the mainland.
Every one of these responses that says "actually China is good at engaging with the world, you're just too ignorant to know it" has made some incredibly poor assumptions about me. I'm not saying this because I'm not looking. I'm saying this because I'm looking and noticing.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
Your other post was bad, this one is better. The problem appears to be that you were trying to say the problem isn't chinese culture, it was that other people just aren't paying attention. You might not agree with that interpretation but that is definitely the message you seemed to be putting out there.
I'm of the view that nobody can get to know China when the CCP so seriously restricts organic engagement from the bottom up with top down censorship and control. The CCP does not know how to generate meaningful alliances or relationships, which implies that they are not going to be able to guide Chinese society more broadly towards cultural exchange. They just don't have the skillset.
It seems like some contrast between "our product is great! Why aren't these idiot consumers buying our microwaves?" Vs "maybe they aren't what people want."
When I responded to you I had no idea you had all this baggage as some Big Deal VIP poster. And I took the post at face value, not that you were trying to claw back previous dismissals of China (or something?).
I stand by my previous comments. But I also think you should keep posting about China if you want. I'll read your takes and be interested in your opinion. I don't really get the meltdown-coded follow up comments, and think you were happy to mock me and then got pissy when I did it back to you. Otherwise I don't think you did anything wrong and you shouldn't be looking to terminate all your engagement with the forum over a minor tiff.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
Do you guys get ugg boots in not-Australia? I'm told foreign made pairs are shit, but Australian made are very good and can last your life.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
That's what I meant, but confused it for a reader by moving from politics, geopolitics and culture, to economics without signposting properly.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
Yes, they literally have the internet. They block e.g. google, facebook, wikipedia. They block particular words and statements on other sites. They're barred from like everything that one could reasonably call the main cultural centres of the online world.
You can go on Chinese twitter, loads of action, mostly related to advertising pornography and prostitutes.
Twitter is technically blocked too. But yeah, I wouldn't class this type of stuff as... charismatic from a cultural sense, right? I think my point stands, unless that's your joke and I'm misunderstanding your dry sense of humour.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
I think it's distinctly un-scary. I know I have a lot in common with a pair of guys in Milwaukee. Because I listen to them sit around and review movies inbetween jokes about alcoholism.
Full-scale cultural compatibility, e.g. New Zealand and Australia, is one of the most powerful forces of peace going.
I know nothing of the Mike and Jay of China because the CCP won't let me.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
If the CCP releases control over Chinese society, and allows e.g. the internet, China will have a massive cultural impact on the world. As it stands, they don't.
TiltingGambit
3mo ago
We were talking cultural and political exports. I should have been clearer.
No most of our immigrants are british and kiwis over that time. In recent years, e.g. since 2019, india/china immigration has increased. But importantly these aren't illegals which is what the whole discourse.
Most foreign born australians are:
British, Kiwi, Chinese, Indian, Filipino.
My point was that it's not political and you can have both high immigration and high satisfaction with it. Re: infrastructure, no this isn't collapsing. Re: housing, yes but this seems to be a problem across the board with all alglosphere countries, including ones with half as much immigration as Australia.
In 2025 we had about 75,000 immigrants from the UK and NZ, and about 75,000 immigrants from India for context. Most of the chinese immigrants are on e.g. student visas or temporary visas, compared to most e.g. brits who move here permanently. So the self preservation thing here might be overstated.
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