TiltingGambit
No bio...
User ID: 804
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
I'm from Australia. We talk about the heat too.
TiltingGambit
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
We were talking cultural and political exports. I should have been clearer.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
Yeah sorry mate, this is too tiresome for me. Nothing you've said changes that in practice, on the ground, Chinese cultural exports, political engagement and geopolitics don't work. I use the phrase "uncharismatic" but sub in "ineffective" or whatever you need. China has no allies, nobody likes what they produce, and nobody likes what they say. China got rich building things that were invented by westerners. Not by producing novel goods that everybody loves. Yes yes, you can say "that doesn’t prove anything" all you want. But it does.
Your whole assessment of my statement was that I must be a dumb American with no sense of China. You were wrong on both points.
I have no secret agenda of pro-American sentiment. My last post was attacking a guy who said the US policy re: Greenland made sense.
Your analysts must be trying too hard. People usually mean what they say.
You need to do better than this to be taken seriously while talking about the CCP. Obvioisly stated intentions matter. Obviously stated intentions aren't the full story when said by a notoriously propaganda driven political party.
No, we do not both conclude. I didn't say that, your rephrasing is a retarded American fantasy. Why do you need to do this? Just directly mock what I actually say, if you would be so kind.
You can hardly accuse me of being unfair after making a whole post which concludes that I am "projecting" as a "true American" who knows nothing and doesn't want to know anything about China. You agreed the world would cut ties with China and back the USA. Don't get pissy about me mixing in a joke.
you're incapable of communicating in plain language, and it's obnoxious of you to pretend to, so I won't cooperate.
I can only roll my eyes so much.
You made a post and used me as an example to prove your point. You got embarrassed because your foundational premise was wrong. Next time, just say "lol my bad. I still think Americans exhibit this behaviour" and I wouldn't even have engaged. But you're tripling down into CCP fantasy land where no failed project is actually a failure, no diplomatic incident means anything, and no allies was actually the plan all along!
That'll be all from me. I'm fine for some interesting China shilling, which can be genuinely good to read. China is an interesting place that we don't talk about enough. But no, Chinese culture is brittle, and the CCP knows this. Hence the top down protectionism.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
Have you considered that the major cultural «defect» here is simply that China is not offering alliances to anyone? That they have strictly one ally, and that ally is Pakistan, which they use solely to keep India distracted? That they believe, and perhaps reasonably, that they do not need any allies or supplicants to achieve what they want? They don't even try to arm Iran. They are watching Russia and Ukraine bleed, and calmly sell weapons to both sides, and lobby for more EVs in the EU. They did not bother to loudly condemn American aggression towards Greenland, just reiterated the commitment to the UN Charter and asked to not be used as a pretext. They don't care.
What's next? She didn't break up with me, I broke up with her?
China has been desperately chasing allies for decades. When the Sino-Soviet split happened, China was left in the Cold. Since then they've been wildly pursuing allies like a realestate agent at a local barbecue. Either Blunderous demands of allegiance or paying off weak nations with checkbook diplomacy that lasts about as long as the infrastructure project takes.
It just doesn't work. China tried to bully a third world Pacific nation by screaming at a foreign affairs minister in his own office:
The latest tensions — part of a heated trade war — boiled over Saturday when four Chinese officials barged into the office of the foreign minister of Papua New Guinea, Rimbink Pato, according to a diplomat in the region and a U.S. official involved in the drafting of the communiqué.
Security officials were summoned, and the Chinese left voluntarily
Fast forward and:
Australia and Papua New Guinea sign Mutual Defence Treaty
As the first step, eligible permanent residents living in Australia who are also PNG citizens will be able to apply to join the ADF from 1 January 2026 – with a view to welcoming the first applicants next year. Ministers agreed to continue supporting the growth and development of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF) as an independent sovereign military. Australia and PNG will upgrade vital facilities at the Goldie River Training Depot outside Port Moresby.
China literally cannot work out how to make friends. They sign projects worth billions of dollars with desperate pacific nations who pocket the money and then swap back to the US as soon as a new Blackhawk variant is released. When China tries to bully instead, countries just form new defensive blocks against them.
Portraying a total inability to do diplomacy on any level as a conscious choice by the CCP is absolute cope. They are desperate for allies, they want allies, they're paying big money for allies, and they cannot get them.
Not sure if you've studied this, but the official Chinese position on the matter of great power politics is...
Obviously the lofty rhetoric about never bullying smaller states may sound very quaint now. But the philosophy, I think, is straightforwardly upheld. They do not intend to act as a superpower no matter how strong they get. They consider it a distraction.
If you are posting CCP propaganda with a straight face, I don't think I have anything else to say. It goes without saying that CCP members saying "We come in peace" can be regarded with some skepticism. I have never met a China analyst, either Western or Chinese raised, who doesn't quote the CCP position and then instantly translate it into what it actually means: usually domestic virtue signaling. Sometimes a balancing act against perceived criticism. Never the words that were said.
Yes, I am. I think the «free world» makes concerned noises, cancels some trade deals, and politely offers Trump to sort it out or whatever. The French are not going to lose their entire fleet (which they may need to defend from American aggression, as they have known for a while) in the South China Sea.
Yeah so let me reiterate: even in your most motivated, pro-China reasoning, you cannot envision a world that doesn't immediately freeze trade with China and pray to god that Trump fixes it. We both conclude that chortling Frenchmen would rather the despicable Trump sends a hundred thousand marines to machine gun down the CCP headquarters than live in a world with a victorious China.
So... what's your actual criticism of my previous post? You made a whole new post to attack my previous one, but when it comes down to it, you agree I'm right. What's going on here? Because right now I would suggest that your post is exactly the type of bizarre and inconsistent messaging from Chinese media/political/cultural exports that the rest of the world finds so uncharismatic and unconvincing.
So my objection to TiltingGambit is just that: the US won't have «all the allies» specifically on merit of its «charismatic cultural export». It's a cute way of expressing pride in your nation's strengths.
It's an indictment on Chinese culture that we can have an international community that is absolutely aghast at the US diplomatic and cultural engagement right now. But exactly zero rich, first world nations, are seriously discussing swapping alliances to China.
We have countries that are dominated by left wing groups that would rather cut off the left pinky of their first born child than build a tank instead of a solar panel. But instead of broaching the Chinese alliance conversation, they're pumping billions into their own military industrial complex.
The USA is literally in the process of threatening war with EU members and destroying NATO. This is a geopolitical conflict, ostensibly to keep China out of the sphere of influence. You cannot argue that the prevalence of alliances with the USA are all just geopolitical and divorced from cultural influence or politics when the US is positioning itself as a geopolitical threat. Chain smoking Danish politicians are sitting in the war room as I type this, very definitely not considering a formal alliance with China.
When I say nobody likes China, I'm not saying people like the USA. I'm horrified by Trump, I'm horrified by US liberals, I'm horrified by the cultural exports of the US that divide society. In an alternate timeline where Europe had not chosen managed decline, I could see the EU as a viable alternative for leadership in the international community.
But in the current timeline, we have a belligerent USA that is still the preferable ally when one looks at China. If you're unwilling to entertain why people aren't voting with their feet in a very straight forward geopolitical conversation, I don't consider you a person who is seriously interested in the questions you're asking.
(That said, he claims to not even be American, so I guess we can conclude this pride narrative also gets exported)
The US pride narrative? Mate, I'm on record calling the American geopolitical strategy "retarded".
And their geopolitical engagement is still somehow more alluring than whatever Beijing is trying to do. If WWIII happens, the worst possible outcome, in any rational person's mind, is China winning. The boomers in Brussels know this. The China experts in Australia know this. The Indians, the Iranians, the Turks know this. If a ship gets sunk in the SCS tomorrow, the free world holds their nose and rallies under the freedom eagle in 5 minutes flat. Are you disputing that, or is your complaint that they should get to know China and swap sides?
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
Anyway, to address your main point, I don't see any rebuttal from you about why TiltingGambit is wrong, just more of your typical sneering about how Americans are arrogant and dumb.
Just to reiterate, I am definitely not American. But I think it does demonstrate the OP's mindset that he's still suspicious that I am, in fact, lying about my nationality in his response to you.
It's like somebody on twitter voicing complaints about BLM, to then be accused of being a white supremacist, and then posting proof that they're actually black. It really jiggles the narrative in an awkward way.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
It's my impression that @TiltingGambit has been projecting, because he, as a true American, felt that there is nothing worth learning about affairs of barbarians in China, Europe or anywhere else
I hate embarrassing you like this, but I'm not American.
And I've been professionally and personally involved in analysing China in some capacity for 15 years.
Lol of course not. My GF literally said "it's 43 tomorrow" 2 mins ago.
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