aiislove
2yr ago
Great post, you've made lots of interesting points, thanks for sharing your perspective.
The weak exist at the mercy of the strong, so they are subservient to the strong.
Context, I'm a white American currently in East Asia (not China) and this exact point I think is the hugest difference between the mindset of rich countries and poor countries (or more specifically, today, rich old countries like USA and Japan and currently poor/recently poor countries like China, Thailand and South Korea.) There is more of a palpable understanding of the risks and dangers of reality in the cultures of poor countries that the US and our aging allies seem to be increasingly oblivious to. Your statement above reads as extremely low class and would probably be shocking to most people in the US but it's so blatantly true that I can't help but feel like any culture that understands it is bound to outcompete any that ignores it for political or social reasons.
it causes me regular frustration that the vast majority of westerners fail to grasp that they're working off of fundamentally different values, let alone understand that they will naturally optimize for those values. Chalk it up to the American belief in universalism[...]
Yes, that's exactly it. The west is too myopically focused on the belief that everyone is equal that they fail to even imagine that a civilization halfway around the world and thousands years older could possibly have a different set of values, for fear that they come across looking racist, when a bit of cultural pragmatism could really help steer things in a more sane direction.
aiislove
2yr ago
Why does there not seem to be much progress with AI in the field of music? I am loving all the AI art and chatGPT stuff coming out but I'm really looking forward to AI implementations in music that are interesting. As a layperson it seems like it shouldn't be too difficult, as music is really rather formulaic at its most basic form.
Most of the AI music stuff I've seen so far has been music generated completely from scratch by AI but that isn't very interesting to me. How far away are we from convincing style transfer for example? I'd love to be able to convert a song into another style of music.
A few years ago I found this soundcloud account but the music is pretty garbled and prone to overfitting. Just seems like miles away from AI in other domains so I'm wondering if anyone has any insight into why AI music seems to be lagging behind AI in visual art and chat.
aiislove
2yr ago
Is anyone here knowledgable about food safety? I really hate getting food poisoning. I've been in Asia for a few months and I'm surprised to see prepared foods including seafood and meat being left at room temperature at grocery stores and food markets all day long. I've seen this in Thailand, South Korea and Japan. In the US prepared foods are required to be refrigerated or heated at all times for food safety reasons.
I did some googling but didn't find any satisfying answers as to whether I personally (as an American) can safely eat food that's been left at room temperature for hours in grocery stores in Asia or not. One forum I read said that food producers (i.e. farmers) have much more strict regulations in East Asia than the rest of the world so it's not a concern. (They also said that in the US and other countries, food safety falls more on the end seller rather than the producer as in East Asia.) Another forum said that Asians are just more used to the contagions that would be present than foreigners so they don't get sick. Another forum mentioned something called "fried rice syndrome" which is a common food poisoning from leftover rice that hasn't been stored properly. If either of the latter two cases are true I think I should avoid eating food that's been sitting out but I'd like to get some advice here.
aiislove
2yr ago
I'm really flattered my post got AAQC'd. I had no idea how it would be received but I'm glad I could spark some interesting conversation. It's all really informed by years of lurking on the motte and applying lots of logic and lessons from other topics to my own experiences with sex and relationships
aiislove
2yr ago
For the longest time I'd assumed that gay men engaged in a pragmatic and egalitarian division of the passive and active roles so that both people get a fair turn.
There are gay relationships where they trade roles sometimes, but it's kind of just a nice thing for the top to do, or something to add excitement to the relationship, but you have to maintain the power dynamic at the end of the day or the relationship is going to fall apart.
I was more surprised to learn that apparently the passive role is predominant among gays.
I would say it depends on who you are and where you are. If you're 6'2 and 300 lb of muscle, everyone's going to look like a bottom to you, and you're going to look like a top to them. It would be degrading to you to be topped by 95% of the guys you meet. But if you're 5'2 120 lb and fem, trying to top, 95% of the guys you meet will be unwilling to be topped by you. Most guys fall in the middle, and younger guys tend to be more bottom and older guys tend to be more top. I don't think it's true that there are always more bottoms than tops, but it may be true that there are more men who see themselves as bottoms or are afraid to top.
Reframing the social dynamic as one where you give up and compete with the woman to win the man is incomprehensibly gay.
This made me laugh. Yeah, I know, I guess I'm trying to elucidate the more base situation that informs my homosexuality versus any straight man, and the best I can do is point to the fact that I'm afraid to compete with men for female attention so I want to compete with women for male attention instead
aiislove
2yr ago
The media and cultural elites really revealed their hatred of poor rural white people during the Trump administration imo. I don't think most people realized what was happening during his presidency but now that it's over, it really feels like TDS was directed toward white people and especially poor white people with little to no cultural power or relevance. Before 2018 I was relatively happy or at least complacent to conform to the fashions and opinions of democratic elites, in the hopes that I could reap the benefits of being part of the ascendant class, but after experiencing the hatred this class of people spewed toward poor white people I really can't stand to associate with democrats anymore.
Circling back to your post, the point I'm trying to make is that I have much more sympathy for middle American white people after the past 6 years than I had before and I feel like white people have actually earned a huge right to feel like the underdogs at this point. I think a ton of people in the creative industry are feeling this as well FWIW, so many of us are sick of working for democrat tastemakers who constantly censor our work and ignore artists creating anything that could threaten their credibility or power. As artists/creatives we're used to rooting for the underdogs and when the legacy art media is constantly screaming at us that only BIPOC voices matter, and that poor white trash people will ruin their careers if they're associated with them, then the poor white trash people are, obviously, the underdogs.
At the end of the day, when you pick on losers, it makes you look like a bigger loser, and it grows support for the people you're picking on. The more the mass media and pop culture and everyone you meet piles on poor white people, the more it reveals how pathetic they are for doing so.
aiislove
2yr ago
I was born in '89, so I remember my very conservative mother forbidding our family from watching The Simpsons while growing up (and she still seems to think it's terrible as of a few months ago) but I never understood what her objection was to the show specifically. Is there a primer on why the show was seen as liberal or controversial when it debuted? Was it just edgy humor or was there something more objectionable to conservatives specifically about the show?
The Blind Men and an Elephant
The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true. [from wikipedia.]
As someone who travels between cultures frequently, I find myself thinking a lot about this parable. Everywhere I go, different people in different places have developed different views and interpretations of the world, but the underlying fundamentals of reality remain unaffected by mere human perception and interpretation. In other words, the elephant remains the same regardless of the spot we’re poking at, rubbing against or cutting into.
I find myself reorienting what I experience and perceive from the viewpoint of my background and upbringing, shaped to some degree by my current context. When I meet new people, I compare them to people I was raised around, my friends and family back home. When I try new foods I orient them in relation to foods I was raised with and are most used to. When I experience new weather patterns I compare them to the climate of my birth. Inextricably I am linked to the time and place of my upbringing.
I was raised in a chaotic home environment between divorced parents. My mother was very strict and had many rules, while my father was very lax and enforced very few rules. My mother raised me in the Protestant church while I attended Catholic school for two years, then I was switched to public school in third grade. The inconsistency between Protestant, Catholic and secular worldviews left me very disenchanted by competing narratives and viewpoints that each assert their own contradicting universal realities which I remain suspicious of today.
General artificial intelligence could be capable of synthesizing the perspectives and contexts of every place and time into one universal viewpoint. Mapping out the elephant of the world with more objectivity seems more plausible than ever before. The self assuredness of modernity and the arrogance of postmodernity (Fukuyama’s end of history, for example) are likely to be dwarfed by the self assurance of any newly synthesized panopticon of awareness that an AGI could run on.
But would an AGI be capable of synthesizing every view of the elephant into one accurate rendering of reality at all, or would it merely be able to switch from one perspective to another? The Japanese conception of reality works well enough in the Japanese context, and my basic understanding or exposure to it is amusing enough to me as an outsider, but start poking at it a bit and the construction begins to fall apart. We westerners are just as bound by the false or skewed construction of the Western viewpoint, which is difficult for us to perceive the limits and contradictions of.
I wonder if the AGI will be a Tower of Babel of sorts that could give the illusion of unity and progress but that ends up dividing us further than ever before.
Actually, the thought of a universal synthesized view of the world is what is most frightening to me because it is so utterly foreign to anything we’ve ever come up with ourselves. Either we will discover things we never wanted to know about ourselves and the universe, or we will fail to discover those things and create an even more dystopian world that further reinforces the skewed, convenient beliefs that I believe we already build our societies on.
——
Many people on the right believe that right wing thinking is fundamentally the position of believing in the power to change things: The power to make different decisions, free will, and so on. But in my years of reading right wing thought, the concept that feels the most fundamentally grounding in right wing theory is the idea that nature remains constant. That is, that the elephant remains the elephant regardless of our interpretation. This is the most reassuring concept to me in right wing thinking: that I don’t need to make the Sisyphean effort to rewire my reaction to things outside my control, that I can just accept them as immutable forces of nature and move on with my life. I also think this is a more loving, understanding view of the fundamentals of reality compared with the left’s struggle to undermine them.
aiislove
2mo ago
That is really interesting about Dresden, I have spent very little time in Germany so I didn't understand that context. I have spent about 2 weeks in Berlin and a few months in Austria and Switzerland, so most of my understanding of German culture comes from that, 3 years of German in highschool and having Swiss and German ancestors. My impression of Germany today is that they are less interested in preserving their heritage than the French and Italians (for example) and are more eager to forget their recent past. I was imagining that much of Germany must be filled with new builds today, like what I saw in Berlin. As a crass American I'm less unimpressed by budget baroque than some aluminum siding, even if it's Vegas quality.
To begin with, liking the middle ages is not a particularly intellectuality-signalling preference in the German context
It was not that it was medieval, it was that it was a rather ugly brown brick wall that lacked any kind of harmony or beauty or refinement which the neighboring baroque structures exuded. He wasn't trying to score points by liking the middle ages, he was trying to score points by telling me how akshually, the poor and undignified structure keeping the whole thing together is more fascinating than all that crass glitz and glamour next door. I know what he's doing! Everyone in academia does this, all the time. My art history professors in college in 2010 all treated the rococo with disdain. The rococo is my favorite era of art history. It is the most beautiful. What you are saying when you try to place some ugly thing above it, is that I uniquely am pure of heart enough to lift up the poor and the ugly, while you, crass plebeian, shamelessly love what's beautiful. In my mind this is cope. But in fact I do empathize with the impulse. I am more attracted to hairy fat men than I am to modelesque elegant men. But that says more about me than it does about anyone else. If I dated a tall blond Chad, I'll just look bad next to him. If I date a chubby short guy, I get to feel better about myself. If you point to a dirty brown wall and tell me it's more interesting, you're intimating to me that you don't see yourself as equal or worthy of the beauty of something beautiful. Which is fine, but don't pretend like you're setting yourself apart by taking a more intellectual viewpoint that hides your insecurity, and then tell me you're doing it righteously.
aiislove
10mo ago
Lastly, does it make a difference who the receptive partner is - is Carl more or less likely to contract HIV from Bob if he's the bottom than if he's the top, or does it make a difference?
Yes, tops rarely contract HIV through performing anal sex on bottoms (though it is thought to be marginally more common in uncircumcised men than circumsised ones.) Bottoming is the main cause of contracting HIV among men who have sex with men.
I don't know if there is any research on whether a woman receiving anal sex is more, less or the same riskiness as a man receiving anal sex in terms of HIV transmission rates but I'm curious to know the answer.
aiislove
1yr ago
Is anyone else considering leaving the US or moving to a secluded area for the 2024 election season? The 2020 and 2016 election seasons had such a negative impact on my mental health that I don't want to stay where I am for the election next year and since I can afford to avoid it I think I will. I will probably also block myself from reading the news and themotte and most social media as well when I'm away. But I can't remember when things really start to amp up where politics becomes unavoidable- the election is held in November, but what time of the year do things start to get ridiculous? I'd like to be gone for all of September through the beginning of November at least but I can't remember if the entire summer in an election year is bad or not. Maybe I'll just wait it out and leave as soon as it gets unavoidable but I fear by then it'll be too late and I'll be too annoyed and I'll chicken out and stay longer than I need to.
aiislove
2yr ago
Yes, I think you're right, and I think the right response when we see people reacting to things that are completely beyond their realm of understanding is compassion and empathy, not condescension and cynicism.
The fact that modern society is able to keep us from helping less educated people around us through top-down silencing and oppression is really rather sick, I don't necessarily lay the blame on people reacting with cynicism in this thread when they also are met with overwhelming social forces that tried to silence them as well. But on a visceral level it strikes me as ugly when smart people reduce dumber people in this way though I can also see how smarter people are being degraded by the powers at the same time.
That's a great article, thanks for linking to it. Actually, homosexuality in the Middle East and Islamic cultures (and Greece) has been really interesting to me and something that I've been trying to demystify for myself and that has informed a lot of my viewpoint above.
For context, I'm a white American but I've spent a small amount of time in Greece, Turkey and the UAE. So by no means am I an expert, but during my travels I have dated and interacted with men and have had some really interesting experiences. The messaging we hear in the west, over and over, is that the Middle East is extremely homophobic, that they stone gays, throw them off buildings etc.. But in my experience, men in Islamic cultures are even more predisposed to homosexual behaviors than men in America or Europe are. I believe it's a combination of men from the Middle East being more egoic and drawn to gratifying their ego in a more shameless way than we are raised to do in the West*, and the natural consequences of a highly gender segregated society where the rules around heterosexual sex are very strict. As you've gestured at, it seems that a sort of makeshift "prison sexuality" abounds in the Middle East. And it is overt: in one instance, my cab driver was hitting on me, he was not shy at all; I refused his come ons because it was weird even though I did find him hot. I went to a restaurant and the guy I sat next to gave me his number and halfway through our meal his friend showed up who was definitely a homosexual, and there are entire areas of Dubai where 95% of the people you see on the street are men. Indeed, I've been all over the world and never experienced more men hitting on me randomly than in the Middle East. I can only imagine that homosexual behavior abounds in these areas, but to identify as homosexual is where people in the ME/Islamic cultures draw the line.
tl;dr "All" gay people in Saudi Arabia are bottoms and act effeminately, and they pick up straight men to penetrate them in hook ups.
That's not exactly how I would characterize the gist of the article. The conclusion I drew was that basically, gay identity is a western/globalist import, and the identification of an individual as a homosexual, itself, is what people object to in these cultures: whereas the pre-globalist position in the Middle East is that you're just a regular person like everybody else who happens to have same sex habits sometimes. And frankly I think this position is so much more relatable to my experience. I'm not gay because I was just born this way, I'm gay because I looked at straight sex, and couldn't conceive myself as having sex with a woman, but I can't escape the allure of sex so I am drawn to performing sex in a way that is unaligned with straight sex: basically I want to do the same thing that straight people are doing, but I'm a man attracted to men so it's going to look different. This is all a bad, rambling version of the point Foucault is trying to make when he pointed out that homosexuality changed in Western society from being a thing people did to something that people are, and that Islamic societies are still operating on the earlier "thing people did" version of the concept, and the "thing people are" version was helpful for gays in the west but has unintended consequences for people when they get imported into other cultures.
So: It's not that all gay people in Saudi Arabia are bottoms, and act effeminately, it's that there are certain people in SA who are adopting western/globalist concepts of what homosexuality "is" and "looks like," interacting with the "straight men" who are really just the old school pre-globalist guys who sometimes have homosexual relationships, but that don't identify with a "gay" label.
And from other research I've done, outside of the modern west and outside of situations where there are just absolutely no women around anywhere for extended periods, most homosexual relations are like this.
Yes, precisely. But actually, it also operates like this in "situations [with] absolutely no women around." (not sure if that's what you meant to say?) Indeed, I think the situation is even more pronounced in "prison gay" situations.
Bottoms don't want to be tops, and tops are only doing it because it's harder to find a woman to hook up with.
I suspect that many bottoms do want to be tops but are afraid to try. But it's more complicated than that. I think most guys aren't total tops or total bottoms, I for example prefer being a top especially in LTR situations but at the same time if there's a guy who I think is really hot I really don't mind if he tops me if he's confident and really able to do it well. Tops topping men because they can't find a woman seems plausible as I've stated above.
Do you have any sexual desire for women? Does seeing a conventional attractive naked woman do anything for you?
No. When I was very young I would masturbate to images of naked women but I rather quickly realized my attraction was really only to men. Recently I have gotten in the habit of watching straight porn occasionally, but only when it's bisexual or cuck porn where the male is the focus. I like to see beautiful women for aesthetic reasons outside of porn but I have no desire to pursue them. I could imagine having sex with a woman if I really believed she liked me, but I can only ever see this happening realistically in a desert island situation where there were no men for me to sleep with instead.
*and also, perhaps, a predisposition to homosexuality/pederasty: See Richard Burton's concept of the sotadic zone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton#Sotadic_Zone
aiislove
2yr ago
The media's attitude toward Tiger King was actually kind of a huge thing that turned me against them around 2020. I watched Tiger King and my takeaway was, honestly, that they look like they're having significantly more fun in their lives than me or anyone who was poo-pooing the show was having. It really made me realize that I don't want to live my life confined by the tastes of people who can make fun of Joe Exotic while their own lifestyle is probably a really depressing routine of uber eats and gray buildings.
Additionally, I think the time before 2016 was way friendlier to quirky white working class people. For example, indie films like Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite, as well as indie folk music like Sufjan and Fleet Foxes were beloved by the NPR set until the entire indie folk quirk scene mysteriously vanished from the media's landscape in favor of queer/bipoc voices throughout the late 2010s
aiislove
2yr ago
I for one would be happy to read the alternate conservative/libertarian version if you bothered to write it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one here who would be.
aiislove
2yr ago
I used to be into gadgets and cool tech stuff growing up. I collected ipods and mp3 players and game systems and stuff like that but I kinda fell off around the time that the PSP came out. Now I have the budget to invest in cool stuff but all I have is a macbook pro and an iphone so I feel pretty boring. What are you guys into these days? I haven't been impressed or wowed by anything new in a long time. It just seems like electronics companies are putting out slight improvements to existing products and there's nothing cool coming out anymore. Are any of you into electronics? What have you seen lately that you're into or looking forward to coming out soon? Are there any good blogs or news sites to follow interesting tech? (especially stuff like indie development, I own Apple products but they're really rather boring and I see them more as nicely functional things than anything that excites me and mainstream Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo gaming has been pretty disappointing all around post-PS2 era imo)
Just want the excitement I used to feel when I would look at a new mp3 player back in 2003 again, haha.
aiislove
2mo ago
nerds
jocks
Everyone needs to go watch a Studio Ghibli movie right now. We should aspire to be well rounded people who aren’t specialized weirdos. People in other countries understand this. Why do Americans want to flatten their identities into one weird thing? Someone thinks they’re a nerd so now they’re absolved of the responsibility of being attractive or the expectation that they can hold a conversation. Someone else believes they’re a jock so now they don’t have to suffer the irritation of being corrected by pedantic relatives or be expected to work at a computer all day. It’s so exhausting and reductive. Why aren’t we supporting everyone to be a well rounded person who is as capable as anyone else at all the various parts of life we’re going to have to deal with? It’s really sad to see people waste away their potential in identities pushed onto them by family and schoolmates at an early age.
aiislove
2mo ago
I'm glad you shared your thoughts regarding Japan, thank you! I know you live there as I've read posts from you before. I don't doubt that you have a more intimate knowledge of the country and culture than I do (myself having spent only about 5 months in the country on three separate trips between 2007 and 2022). I probably came across as more harsh and critical than I meant to. I really like Japan a lot. The kissaten and mah jong parlors are amazing to me too, but undoubtedly signals of stagnation. It's actually deeply respectful and cool in a way- I wish the rust belt city I grew up in kept its own culture alive to with the same affection and attention to detail that Japan is doing.
And on the other hand, I don't actually always have a transcendent experience of France. I mentioned that I've been there more than any other country outside my own which is true but I don't really know why. The social mores are opaque and exhausting to me. Every time I leave the country I feel relief that I don't have to worry about pissing off a shopkeeper without understanding what I did. But all of that is true even while the positive things I said about it are also true.
Glad you enjoyed my post, thanks for engaging!
aiislove
1yr ago
Merry Christmas to you too! Last Christmas I was by myself in South Korea and I mostly ignored it so that I wouldn't be sad I was missing it at home. I think I facetimed my mom and probably ate western food but otherwise didn't do much. Hope you and your family enjoy your Christmas in Japan.
aiislove
1yr ago
I was a digital nomad for over a year. I grew a bit desensitized to the place vs place, Japan thing. One of the first things I noticed was that when I was walking around a foreign country, everything seemed magical just because I knew I was in a foreign place, but eventually I started to realize that things aren't always super special just because it's foreign. Sometimes the small things are just small differences and don't really have any meaning. When I started traveling I was really annoyed with the US so every difference I would see I would make up some story to myself about how it's so much better than in America. Eventually I developed a better and more keen sense of where things lie and I can appreciate differences in culture and aesthetics while understanding the downsides to differences as well. I still enjoy traveling overseas and exploring new cultures but I think the most important thing I learned is to respect whatever I see everywhere I go, whether that's a foreign country or my small hometown.
Exploring more of Asia also brought greater perspective on the Japan thing as well, having been to Thailand and South Korea I feel like I understand Japan better and can see it more for what it is. I was always a total weeaboo for a long time and visited Japan a few times growing up but stayed there for three months recently and it was great to live there while working from my computer but having been to Seoul it's easy to see how the stagnating economy has been hurting Japan, compared to the up to date and high tech vibe of South Korea which Japan used to have a few decades ago.
Speaking as a designer I will say that Japanese aesthetics and design are objectively better than in most of the world though. There is something different about the sense of space in Japan and attention to detail that I find really attractive to the country.
To directly address the question you posed, what are some lesser known examples of place vs place, Japan?
I think the Appalachian mountains are ridiculously beautiful and extremely underrated. Every time I drive through West Virginia I'm impressed by the scenery. I would consider moving to the region.
aiislove
1yr ago
The sound really irritates me, I'm gay and she's not that pretty so I'm not that interested, I really really want to eat the sandwich, the glove pull and smack weren't really satisfying to me, I don't like how the tall skinny rectangle looks on my fat wide computer screen, I don't drink alcohol so the beer doesn't do it for me but I really want the sandwich (still)
aiislove
1yr ago
FWIW if budget is an issue, I didn't even know there was a patreon for themotte until I read this comment and I've been lurking here forever. I really hate ads and begging for money generally but maybe promoting the fact that there is a patreon for the place a bit more isn't a bad idea if you need more money to run things.
aiislove
1yr ago
You ignore race at the expense of living in and experiencing reality. I would love to have the luxury of ignoring race all the time, but I don't have that luxury. It doesn't really stop at race either, any time you distract yourself from any kind of material reality you are doing yourself and those around you a disservice. You can tell yourself that men and women are exactly the same and redefine the definitions all you want a la Judith Butler but it's as incoherent at the end of the day as telling yourself that Vietnamese men and men from Ghana are the same thing. I've been all around the world and it's simply not true. Black men are more prone to violence and aggression and are more sexually threatening and intimidating than East Asian men, for example. It's so simple that people don't want to look at it. Just go to the fair and look at the chickens. There will be small meek chickens and big aggressive ones. Look at dogs. There simply are differences. Advocating for race blindness on the backdrop of BLM riots is absurd, this just feels out of step with reality at this point.
Racial blindness is a great ideal to work toward, especially in times of peace and little social unrest, but right now it's just so ridiculously out of step with the times that it seems kind of incoherent. It doesn't seem in effect very far removed from the liberal anti-racist position which is also glaringly out of touch.
This will be sort of speaking on the meta level on @Lepidus's comments, as I don't really have a response to this specific post. I've been in East Asia for a few months now (and not my first time visiting,) and I really love the people here. So kind, smart, organized, polite, I adore the aesthetics and so many aspects of the culture here. Being on public transit where people don't talk and just follow basic rules of etiquette is about three million times nicer than any ride on the bus or train in Europe let alone America. But I'm somewhat sympathetic to Lepidus's underlying point as well, though I don't think he's particularly good at rhetoric. What I'm specifically referring to is that I find the political and social structures of East Asia to be quite restrictive. I don't want to live under a regime that is treating me like I'm East Asian. I love visiting the area for the novelty and to experience something different from the West, but the lack of individual freedom here is hard to cope with as a relatively libertarian American person. There certainly are values that Chinese hold differently from the West and it isn't a waste of time to worry about that, given the geopolitical situation.
Agree that Lepidus's tone is combative and the posts are a bit incoherent but since no one seems to be taking his side I just thought I'd try to throw a bone out to maybe spark discussion in a different direction.
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