problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
I'm not a Marxist (although I do think they make some good points that are worth taking into serious consideration), so I'm not here to defend Marxism qua Marxism, and I'm certainly not here to defend the specific economic policies of the USSR or China.
Okay, fair enough. Consider my question revoked then. You bring up some interesting points, I have some thoughts on a couple of them.
Marx never said "you have to immediately and forcibly collectivize all farmland".
An aside - Vietnam's implementation wasn't exactly immediate; it was a gradual rollback of the possibility of private enterprise involving multiple steps. It started with the Land Reform Law which involved redistributions of land from landed Vietnamese to those the VCP considered to be impoverished, then progressed towards forming mutual aid teams of farmers who were encouraged to aid each other with work on their fields (which, at this point, they still privately owned) during periods of peak labour demand. Then they created agricultural production cooperatives obligating them to perform collective labour for the state, rewarding them with workpoints, and it was then that the process of collectivising proper started.
I do realise this isn't the main point so I'll move on though.
What he did say is that there need to be a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which the proletariat would commandeer state power and use it to begin the process of overcoming capitalism. But no one can decide for the proletariat how they should go about this or what exactly this process should look like; they have to decide it for themselves, concretely, as they struggle through the actual process. (I think the DotP is a bad and unworkable idea for many reasons, which in turn is one of the many reasons why I'm not a Marxist.)
I have read this and Marx does state the following about the dictatorship of the proletariat:
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible."
"Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production."
"These measures will, of course, be different in different countries."
"Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable."
"1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes."
"2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax."
"3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance."
"4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels."
"5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly."
"6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State."
"7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan."
"8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture."
"9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country."
"10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c."
"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character."
It's not exceptionally specific, but it's not non-specific, either; many broad goals are laid out, including abolition of land and collectivisation of production by the state, and it notes that this should be achieved via "despotic inroads on the rights of property". This model outlined here actually parallels what a lot of communist countries in effect chose to do; they were in fact loosely following the instructions contained within Marx (and Engels') famous manifesto. I think this model clearly has not worked in any case in which it has been implemented.
Guilty as charged, yes. I think all the sophisticated ones would admit to this.
Which is an issue when your movement has a strong urge to tear down and then proceeds to have no idea what to do once the much-hated system has been completely dismantled. My perception upon talking to many Marxists in my time around these people is that there isn't that clear of an idea regarding how one would handle the incentive problems, coordination problems, etc that the envisioned society would face. I find many of them don't really have a proper theory of governance; they pretty much just cross their fingers and hope ideology does the work of sorting all these issues out once capitalism is no longer an obstacle.
When you're working on things as complex and fragile as entire societies, you just can't operate like this.
Of course almost everyone is going to want to be assured of their basic survival and security. That one is pretty hard to get around.
Proceeding from the assumption that this is a prerequisite for human flourishing, I would like you to illustrate how a state governed by the principles of Marxism would be superior in securing "value" for people (however you define this) as opposed to capitalism. It's not difficult to radically question others' conceptions of value and attack their stated goals. Sowing philosophical doubt via endless Socratic questioning is easy, especially when it comes to a wishy-washy question without an answer like "what is value?". It's not quite so easy to make your own value proposition, defend it from criticism and prove that your preferred social structure best satisfies that. As such I find Marxists are really good at subversive critique of the existing order, but their ability to demonstrate the utility of their own system is downright anaemic. It is characterised by evasive, wishy-washy arguments meant to distract people from the fact that their vision for society is extremely ill-defined.
Personally, I think we have enough evidence that a Marxist state struggles to grant the majority of its populace even the bottom tier of Maslow's hierarchy and thus fails at the first hurdle. Vietnam's experience with collective production is a pretty illustrative example. Collectivisation nearly starved that entire country and after private production, trade and other capitalisty things were established and bolstered by the government, agricultural production skyrocketed and the populace explicitly stated they considered themselves better off. Is there any better measure of value than the people's own assessment of their well-being? If there is one, I would like to hear it.
I suppose it is always possible that the Vietnamese were brainwashed by the nascent capitalist system into valuing the wrong things... ah, false consciousness, how many issues thou can explain away.
I mean, were they? What is "winning"? Is the winner the one with the most weapons, or are the weapons just a means to some other win condition?
You've admitted that the need for survival and security is "pretty hard to get around". Guess what having weapons is meant to help with? Arms races that involve the production of resources are a fact of life in any remotely multipolar system, and unless you live in delulu land everyone knows they have to participate unless they want to be somebody else's punching bag at best, and wiped off the face of the earth at worst.
Having resources does not directly equal value, no, but it sure helps achieve most terminal goals aside from "starvation, poverty and the slow death of my entire society".
Having read many books and papers about the acts of communist regimes, lots of brutal and frankly sadistic executions are pretty par for the course. The best books I've read on the topic contain such a large number of casual documentations of atrocities that one feels sick for hours afterwards.
One of the most stomach-churning books I've ever read is about the Great Leap Forward, written by a scholar who had lived through it and somehow toed the party line throughout (realised the whole thing was rotten afterwards). Here is one of the many sections of the book that calmly lists off reams upon reams of atrocities inflicted on the populace:
Excessively high requisition quotas made procurement difficult. If farmers were unable to hand over the required amount, the government would accuse production teams of concealing grain. A “struggle between the two roads” (of socialism and capitalism) was launched to counteract the alleged withholding of grain. This campaign used political pressure, mental torture, and ruthless violence to extort every last kernel of grain or seed from the peasants. Anyone who uttered the slightest protest was beaten, sometimes fatally.
At the end of September 1959, Wang Pinggui, a member of the Wangxiaowan production team, was forced to hand over grain kept in his home, and was beaten with a shoulder pole, dying of his injuries five days later. Not long after Wang’s death, the rest of his four-member household died of starvation.
In October 1959, Luo Mingzhu of the Luowan production team, upon failing to hand over any grain, was bound and suspended in mid-air and beaten, then doused with ice-cold water. He died the next day.
On October 13, 1959, Wang Taishu of the Chenwan production team, upon failing to hand over any grain, was bound and beaten with shoulder poles and rods, dying four days later. His fourteen-year-old daughter, Wang Pingrong, subsequently died of starvation.
On October 15, 1959, Zhang Zhirong of the Xiongwan production team, upon failing to hand over any grain, was bound and beaten to death with kindling and poles. The brigade’s cadre used tongs to insert rice and soya beans into the deceased’s anus while shouting, “Now you can grow grain out of your corpse!” Zhang left behind children aged eight and ten who subsequently died of starvation.
On October 19, 1959, Chenwan production team member Chen Xiaojia and his son Chen Guihou were hung from the beam of the communal dining hall when they failed to hand over any grain. They were beaten and doused with cold water, both dying within seven days. Two small children who survived them eventually died of starvation.
On October 24, 1959, the married couple Zheng Jinhou and Luo Mingying of the Yanwan production team had 28 silver coins seized from their home during the campaign and were beaten to death. Their three children, left without anyone to care for them, starved to death.
On November 8, 1959, Xu Chuanzheng of the Xiongwan production team was falsely accused of withholding grain. He was hung from the beam of the communal dining hall and brutally beaten, dying six days later. The six family members who survived him subsequently starved to death.
On November 8, 1959, Zhong Xingjian of the Yanwan production team was accused of “defying the leadership,” and a cadre hacked him to death with an ax.
And:
In the calamity at Guangshan County’s Huaidian people’s commune in the autumn of 1959, the commune’s average yield per mu was 86 kilos, for a total of 5.955 million kilos. The commune’s party committee reported a yield of 313 kilos per mu, for a total of 23.05 million kilos. The procurement quota set by the county was 6 million kilos, which exceeded the commune’s total grain yield. In order to achieve the procurement quota, every means had to be taken to oppose false reporting and private withholding, and every scrap of food had to be seized from the masses. The final procurement was 5.185 million kilos. All of the communal kitchens were closed down, and deaths followed. Liu Wencai and the commune party committee attributed the kitchen closures and deaths to attacks by well-to-do middle peasants and sabotage by class enemies, and to the struggle between the two paths of socialism and capitalism. They continued the campaign against false reporting and private withholding for eight months. Within sixty or seventy days not a kernel of grain could be found anywhere, and mass starvation followed.
The commune originally numbered 36,691 members in 8,027 households. Between September 1959 and June 1960, 12,134 people died (among them, 7,013 males and 5,121 females), constituting 33 percent of the total population. There were 780 households completely extinguished, making up 9.7 percent of all households. The village of Jiangwan originally had 45 inhabitants, but 44 of them died, leaving behind only one woman in her sixties, who went insane.
There was a total of 1,510 cadres at the commune, brigade, and production team level, and 628, or 45.1 percent, took part in beatings. The number beaten totaled 3,528 (among them 231 cadres), with 558 dying while being beaten, 636 dying subsequently, another 141 left permanently disabled, 14 driven to commit suicide, and 43 driven away.
Apart from the standard abuse of beating, kicking, exposure, and starvation, there were dozens of other extremely cruel forms of torture, including dousing the head with cold water, tearing out hair, cutting off ears, driving bamboo strips into the palms, driving pine needles into the gums, “lighting the celestial lantern,” forcing lit embers into the mouth, branding the nipples, tearing out pubic hair, penetrating the genitals, and being buried alive.
When thirteen children arrived at the commune begging for food, the commune’s party secretary, surnamed Jiang, along with others incited kitchen staff to drag them deep into the mountains, where they were left to die of hunger and exposure.
With no means of escaping a hopeless situation, ordinary people could not adequately look after their own. Families were scattered to the winds, children abandoned, and corpses left along the roadside to rot. As a result of the extreme deprivations of starvation, 381 commune members desecrated 134 corpses.
This is all just from the first chapter.
Given this, not very many of the events that @FCfromSSC has quoted strike me as particularly fantastical. I've stopped reading these since; looking at things like the Khmer Rouge grabbing infants by their legs and smashing their heads against trees until they died (to prevent them from taking revenge for their parents) tends to give one a thousand-mile stare for the ages. It's certainly contributed to my (already intense) misanthropy.
Marcuse then went on to deem the precept of tolerance invalid and advocated quashing any free marketplace of ideas (more complete analysis here), ostensibly to rid society of false consciousness. Many of the tactics he outlined are still present in the strategies of the modern-day left:
- Selective tolerance for movements from the left and intolerance for movements from the right.
- Abolishing journalistic integrity and impartiality, since objectivity is spurious.
- Getting rid of impartiality in historical analysis, so as not to treat the "great struggles against humanity" the same way as the "great struggles for humanity".
- Flooding the education system with leftist and "emancipatory" ideas, so that the seeds of liberation can be planted early on.
He strongly advocates for proselytising his personal belief and value system everywhere and suppressing points of view counter to it, all the while calling it "liberating tolerance". This is supposed to create a society free of indoctrination apparently.
Out of all the philosophers I have read, Marcuse has to be one of the most shameless. You really just have to plainly read critical theory to start hating it.
So the leftist middle class needed a new victim for whom they could claim to fight. Women. Ethnic and sexual minorities (except pedos, because everyone hates pedos).
French philosophers have entered the chat.
No, seriously, not only did existentialists sign petitions calling for the decriminalisation of sex with minors and asking for the release of jailed pedophiles, many prominent members of the French left were also pedophiles themselves. Michel Foucault made repeated trips to Tunisia so he could abuse boys. Simone de Beauvoir groomed many of her female students. It's wild they're still remembered fondly at all today.
I'm the same. I can't really form proper models of people over the internet through just their self-descriptions and their usernames, and it's especially tough considering I have a hard time imagining faces in the first place. Here's you:
- Middle-aged.
- Half-Jewish German.
- Father to a daughter (who he is rather fond of).
- Married to a very dysfunctional woman with whom he has a working partner/SAHM dynamic.
- Does not think Peter Watts is a good writer.
I think it's particularly difficult to form proper conceptions of people in TheMotte in spite of how regular most users are, since this forum isn't all that personally-oriented - it tends to be arranged around debating abstract ideas and less about discussing one's own situation. Also everyone here is very concerned with OpSec because of all the wrongthink bandied around on a daily basis, and many members here have jobs and families they would like to shield from any consequences of their online speech.
I feel a little bad about the deluge of requests you're gonna get. Though you really should have expected this, hah.
You're half correct. Malaysian Chinese, (semi-)short black hair which stands on end as if I've been electrocuted, buzzed on the sides. Dude, 24, wears glasses (is hopelessly shortsighted), perpetual smirk, wears almost exclusively white shirts. Imagining a more well put-together version of L from Death Note probably gets you 95% of the way there.
problem_redditor
2mo ago
How do I look?
Note: Answer will determine whether I ever comment on another post of yours again.
Classic hyperagency/hypoagency. Men need to adapt to fit society (or they are failures who need to be mocked for their fragility), whereas society needs to adapt to fit women (or else it's failing women and victimising them). Feminists malignantly prey on and reinforce this double standard all the time.
This ultimately doesn’t say too much though. You can't really look at a bunch of women's clothing, check for ones that have pockets, see how well they're doing and then draw any conclusions about whether the lack of pockets in women's clothing is demand-driven or not. It is possible for women's clothing with pockets to sell well and for the lack of pockets in women's clothing to still be demand-driven.
To put forward a simplistic example let's say that 15% of women would want pockets, and that the remainder don't. Let's say that a slightly smaller percentage of women would be willing to pay extra for pockets due to the additional cost of sewing on functional pockets (note that pockets are a pain in the ass; even the non-functional ones are if they have flaps and bindings and the rest, but the functional pockets take a lot more time even than that). If ~13% of women's pants have functional pockets, and the remainder do not, clothing with pockets will still sell well even when the relative lack of pockets in women's clothing is demand-driven, since the supply of that good is appropriately scaled to its demand.
Unfortunately I am not aware of any economic studies on this, likely because the topic is trivial and the answer is obvious. Most of the literature I am able to find on it is ideologically-infused sociology without even the slightest hint of rigour. All I can say is that personally, as a dude, I actually don't like pockets, it doesn’t feel particularly secure and I often carry a sling bag along with me in non-professional circumstances where it would be more socially acceptable for me to do so. I assume that the incentive to just use purses is greater when you want to carry makeup and other items (the women I know pack a ton of stuff in their purses; I'm honestly not sure what half of it is for).
I want to make something with my own two hands but I'm not quite sure what. Recently I've been looking at many historical and traditional forms of woodworking, sculpture and pottery, and find myself thinking that I would really like to do something like that to a very high level. To make something functional, practical and yet highly decorative in a way that isn't being satisfied by most of the output coming out today.
If I'm starting this, I want to try to be good at it. Really good. But there's a pretty big issue - unsurprisingly there isn't very much information on most of that stuff and learning these skills authentically seems downright prohibitive if you are unable to be physically present. Much of this is taught through an apprenticeship/mentorship model where you have to be there, and very little instruction on the techniques used seem to be available online. Many of these skills are also hyperspecific enough that just learning the foundations won't be enough, and you'll have to aggressively trial-and-error your way through trying to properly do it (just because you know basic music theory doesn't mean you can compose a fugue).
As an example, I was looking at Chaozhou wood carving today and was highly impressed with all of the layers of multi-level detail they were able to pull off (gallery of examples here and here). Look at this Gilt Woodcarving Large Shrine right here, that looks insane. This is an art form that's still actively practiced in the Chaoshan region of China, so I expected there would be at least some detailed information on the techniques and perhaps some demonstrations of the tools used - but there's nothing. Looking that up in Chinese? Nothing, either. This shit is basically the Dark Arts, passed down through families and occasionally made accessible to the outside world through craftsmen willing to mentor people. To a lesser extent it's the case for high-level European woodworking arts as well, not everyone can carve like a Compagnon. Most online guidance teaches you to do things to a very low level.
Even traditional European Renaissance painting (I'm not necessarily looking at doing painting myself) isn't being actively taught in many art colleges in spite of the fact it was the source of many codified Western artistic techniques. The Royal College of Art, Calarts, and the University of the Arts London offer no specific courses in Renaissance painting techniques, though there is a fine art painting course in the University of the Arts London that... doesn't really focus heavily on classical painting skills but includes other super important topics such as how "postcolonialism, climate change and feminism" have inspired artists' studio practices. If you want to learn how to implement the principles and techniques used by Renaissance artists, you have to go to more specialised places like the Florence Academy of Art, which isn't particularly feasible if you live on the other side of the world. Of course there are plenty of resources on Renaissance painting you can read yourself, but still; one would imagine it would feature more in curricula given its importance to Western art. The situation for other less-known skills are far worse.
I suppose much of this is meant to prepare people for the commercial world where these traditional skills now find a limited market, but it's kind of dismaying just how inaccessible these skills are even in an age where they should be more available to anyone than ever, and that much established art practice no longer covers them. There's not really a systematised way where you can learn how to do some of this stuff, and to do it right, at least not on your own.
Thoughts? What do you think would be a good thing to try my hand at?
I feel like I'm the only person in existence who doesn't like Cowboy Bebop.
It's a very vibey show but it's all aesthetics, the characters and their motivations are about as deep as a puddle, and the episode-to-episode plots make very little logical sense and feel like they were all made up on the spot with a lot of technobabble to cover up the sheer lack of effort put into any of the plotting or worldbuilding. I watched many episodes and never got the sense that it was a coherent world with rules that had to be adhered to at all. Incoherent ass-pulling constitutes a significant portion of how most of the plots in each episode actually progress, and it's really hard to be invested in the episodic narratives when some deus ex machina can be invoked at literally any time to turn the plot on its head. The overarching reaction I had to most episodes was "This is happening now, I guess". Honky Tonk Women is an early example of an episode that's just needlessly contrived and really only exists because of a lot of irrationality and a one-in-a-million coincidence without which the plot would not happen.
They also try to pull emotional scenes at the end of most episodes that don't hit IMO because they spent too little time fleshing out the characters; that moment in Asteroid Blues when it's revealed that Asimov and Katerina won't make it to Mars is clearly supposed to be a pensive one, but you've spent all of 15 minutes with them at that point and so the emotional scene feels unearned. Also seriously, does anyone actually like Faye Valentine? She's superficially charming but is often shown to be a selfish, arrogant, lazy individual who leeches off the rest of the Bebop without so much as a show of gratitude, with a bad habit of gambling all her money away.
Visually, aurally, it's a great experience; the whole atmosphere is immaculate. But you need more than that to carry a show IMO, and animes almost always fall apart on plotting and characterisation for me (Japanese narrative writing generally rarely delivers on these fronts). Ghost In The Shell is another great example of a classic anime with fantastic art direction crippled by a wafer-thin narrative, which purports to be way more than it actually is given that it has basically nothing much to say on the subjects of consciousness and AI it touches on (what it does say is vague and bordering on incoherent). This banger of an intro sequence deserved so much better.
I was indeed offering a hypothetical (mostly based on my limited knowledge of OP's situation and the fact he has described himself as a "depressed shrink"), but I half agree and half disagree with what you've written here.
As for anhedonia I have no answer. It's a term I learned on reddit, meaning at first I assumed it was just a pretend word meant to be a catchall excuse for not getting out of fucking bed. I'm not unwilling to believe it is a real thing, but I would suspect finding the root cause of this and sorting it out should be any one individual's main goal in life if he finds himself suffering from it for any length of time. Of course for the anhedonic there is always the convenient excuse: They simply don't have motivation to do anything. I cannot imagine a household where anyone would accept or tolerate this without taking some action to sort it.
Speaking as someone who veered closer to suicide at one point than I usually care to admit and who has also seen claims of poor mental health used as a way to excuse one's failures and a means of aggressively manipulating others (mostly by women who in retrospect exhibited many traits of BPD), I'm of two minds about this. Often it can be beneficial to adopt the mindset of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps and stop whining" and it helps induce a positive feedback loop wherein doing more productive things in turn improves your mood and consequently motivation, but there is a point beyond which it will actually make things worse; beyond a certain level of despair some external assistance can be necessary. Of course it's always a problem that should be solved, it should never be left to fester, but I find maturity is knowing the appropriate context in which one should deploy these two strategies.
Not enough time is a flimsy excuse. There is nearly always enough time for anything that matters. We carve out time for what is important to us. We do what we have to or need to do before we do what we want to do.
I don't necessarily disagree, but "anything that matters" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here and doesn't really tell you what you should prioritise, since that is a value judgement that's heavily dependent on the individual. There is a lot of grey area in between "what you need to do" and "what you want to do". Yes if you're an extremely unhealthy weight, losing that weight should be a major priority. On the other hand, if you're within a healthy range perhaps reading books, learning things, etc may actually give you more utility than losing that extra weight and getting swole, depending on what you personally value.
Of course if you're just choosing between these two options you can likely do both to some extent. But tradeoffs inherently have to be made, and inevitably you will not have enough time for something. There are legitimate situations and preference rankings which result in goals like "exercising more" being put on the back burner.
problem_redditor
2mo ago
From how it’s presented I assume it is a 5-point scale, with the median value of 3 revised downwards to zero.
problem_redditor
2mo ago
Not OP, but I imagine there are two reasons why not: Time and anhedonia.
I actually kind of like this interpretation of the plot, that Rorschach initially intended to build another version of itself around the sun but Captain turned it into an advantage for itself instead. Actually a pretty good resolution of the apparent contradiction.
Incidentally, this all implies that almost all of the character actions in Blindsight are irrelevant to the plot, and even actively counterproductive, because the single most important thing occurring is the Captain making sure that Big Ben never susses out that there is another super-intelligence in the mix.
The crew in Blindsight even without this interpretation are mostly irrelevant to the Captain's plan - they spend most of their time following Captain's orders or being manipulated by Captain, and even then much of what they do doesn't end up directly contributing to the resolution of the story. Most of the events in the story were planned by Captain long beforehand. I actually think this is a theme of the story - your amount of actual agency in the plot inversely correlates with your level of consciousness.
Susan James is probably the most conscious individual on Theseus, and Rorschach easily turns her against herself and co-opts her for its own plans. Isaac Szpindel, who boasts a huge amount of augmented senses that elevate his sensory world far beyond an average baseline, gets unceremoniously killed early on in the book before he even has any time to put his skillset to use. Amanda Bates, the combat "specialist", is pretty much entirely useless and is just a glorified safety-catch to make sure her automated drones aren't as effective as they could be without her. Siri Keeton, the famously un-self-aware protagonist who does his job without realising how he does it, ends up being one of the least co-opted or affected by Rorschach, and ends up being a surprisingly relevant part of Captain's plan when it turns out his role is to play stenographer and relay all the information to the public (And how do they get him to do this? They break him to make him more human and more manipulable).
The critical revelation that the aliens are not conscious and are hostile was made by the vampire, who has a reduced level of consciousness compared to your baseline human - or Captain itself, depending on how you interpret their neural link. Literally everything else was planned by Captain, an automaton that likely operates in a manner not too dissimilar to how Rorschach itself does.
The fact that very few of the characters actually had any agency at all in Blindsight is a feature, not a bug. You're not reading about plucky oddballs making decisions and saving the world, you're reading about an extended game of 4D chess between two non-conscious gods in which the humans are a footnote at best. Theseus itself is an analogy for how the book says the human brain works, with the conscious actors being irrelevant at best and actively harmful at worst, and the non conscious actors being responsible for almost everything in spite of the fact they’re usually backgrounded in the plot.
My favorite flourish of his was in Echopraxia, where he casually dropped the non-bomb that reality in that book was proven to be a simulation, but it never comes up again and has no impact on anything.
Echopraxia was quite the mess. There were things I enjoyed about it, but it lacked a lot of narrative direction and also contained a lot of plot points that didn't make any sense at all just because the story had to happen.
I think in general Watts' short stories work better than his novels, since short stories lend themselves to the exploration of a single conceptual thread which is his clear strong point. With the exception of Blindsight and perhaps the Freeze-Frame Revolution I think things tend to fall apart when Watts is left to craft an extended narrative - there are often a whole lot of unrelated ideas not relevant to the story and there's a general lack of narrative cohesion. The lack of character depth also tends to become far more clear when he has more words to waste on them. Though, you don't really read Watts for his spellbinding characters.
I enjoyed the book so much I read it four times. Not that there aren't quibbles to be had with some of its storytelling, but the concepts and overall narrative are strong enough to overcome its deficits.
something in me says Lovecraft did it better. Probably a matter of taste
Vehemently disagree with this in particular. In theory Lovecraft would be something I'd enjoy, but I get pretty tired of his penchant for showing the reader incomprehensible unexplained creatures, then stressing endlessly how easily our world could be ended by them - IMO, that is trivially easy to achieve if no burden whatsoever is placed on the writer to explain anything or make it make sense. The challenge with this kind of fiction in my opinion is to introduce a concept inherently clever or terrifying enough to maintain that sense of starkness, alienness and cosmic horror even when the mystery box is opened fully. I get so tired of aliens where the entire point of their existence is to be alien for the sake of being alien - it's easy to write godmade horrors if you're just optimising for weirdness and incomprehensibility, it's not easy to write them if you're simultaneously trying to make them comprehensible and plausible while retaining the dread. The horror in cosmic horror comes from it feeling real enough such that the audience would actually entertain it as a possibility.
Blindsight's cosmic horrors are maybe the only ones in fiction that feel truly alien and scary to me. Most of the others I've encountered are basically souped-up elves with even less plausibility.
Thanks for the detailed advice. At the moment I have six different possible plans featuring separate parts of China, all of which are still open to very heavy revision:
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Beijing - Datong - Pingyao - Linfen - Xi'an;
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Xi'an - Tianshui - Zhangye - Jiayuguan - Dunhuang (so basically travelling the length of the Hexi Corridor);
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Suzhou - Tongli - Hangzhou - Hongcun - Wuyuan (as a jumping off base for Sanqingshan);
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Chongqing - Chengdu - Leshan - Langzhong - Guangyuan - Xi'an;
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Xiamen - Quanzhou - Tulou - Chaozhou - Kaiping - Macau; and
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Kunming - Dali - Shaxi - Lijiang - Shangri-La.
I'm interested primarily in history + some natural sights (preferably without too many tourists!). Feel free to comment on some of these destinations if you've visited. But I realise that's a lot of items, way too much to individually work through, so I'll only ask questions about the destinations you've specifically mentioned.
Chongqing is definitely a place I'm highly interested in, not just because of the outright strangeness of the city itself but also the Dazu rock carvings outside of it. There are five main locations (Baodingshan, Beishan, Nanshan, Shimenshan and Shizhuanshan) and there's also yet another lesser known complex of rock carvings called the Anyue grottoes relatively close by. I've been wondering if the site is interesting enough to justify spending a night in Dazu just so I can explore all the grottoes at a leisurely pace, or if a day trip from Chongqing to see the main two sites of Baodingshan and Beishan would be a better use of my time. From Chongqing it is about 1.5 hours each way, which is making me wonder just how rushed a day trip would be just using public transport.
With regards to Chongqing itself, what are the main places you would recommend? I know of the famous Hongyadong and Kuixing Building, as well as Shibati, Xiahaoli and the Shancheng footpath. There's some historical/cultural sites such as the Huguang Guild Hall, Luohan Temple and Laojun Cave, which I will certainly visit if I go to Chongqing (Erfo Temple in Hechuan seems to be an easy day trip out too). I also hear about lots of old bomb shelters built during the city's short stint as a wartime capital, which have been converted into public spaces and libraries and restaurants and galleries. Is there anything else I've missed?
Kaifeng is an unexpected recommendation because I haven't heard anybody else speaking about it as a destination in spite of its historical importance (perhaps on the Chinese internet they are). What would you say are the best things to visit in that city? I broadly know about Daxiangguo Temple, Yanqing Taoist Temple, Shanshangan Assembly Hall, Kaibao Si Pagoda, Po Pagoda, Dongda Mosque and so on but they don't seem like enough to fill out an entire week. Would be interested to hear about your itinerary when you were there.
Guizhou's mountain villages are interesting and I've been looking at them for a while but haven't been able to fully narrow down what I want to see. Happy to hear your personal recommendations for the province. Something I keep hearing about a number of these villages (I hear it a lot about the Xijiang Miao Village) is that they're overly Disneylandified and set up for tourists? If possible I'd like to avoid that. Langde, Nanhua and Basha Miao Villages as well as Zhaoxing Dong and Dali Dong Village are some of the ones I'm interested in, I'm wondering if staying in one of those villages for a night is worth it. Fanjingshan is another big destination I am interested in.
Finally, how far north would you say I could go in December before the cold starts to get intolerable? Shanxi province has a lot of ancient Tang and Liao architecture and that makes it very attractive to me, but it's also very far north in China. Just trying to see how much my scope is limited by the climate.
Hope this isn’t too much, feel free to respond to as much or as little as you want.
These types of oddly existential/cosmic horror-laced memes are basically 90% of the videos on burialgoods' channel. Pretty sure he has actually done a voiceover of the processed ham meme at one point.
It's just not typical for pad thai. Pad thai uses Thai chili flakes, which are dried chilies that have been roasted for a more smoky flavour and pounded into flakes. Fresh chill is just a bit too sharp and won't mesh so well with the overall flavour profile of the dish.
That being said, it's really not the worst thing you could do to the dish if you can't find flakes and I wouldn't point it out had he not made so many mistakes.
This has nothing to do with wellness, but as a Southeast Asian, I need to urgently talk about all the war crimes Adam Ragusea committed against pad thai in this video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=puHSU9ZaZPY
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too much sugar in recipe
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advocates using worcestershire sauce in pad thai
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puts soy sauce in pad thai
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puts ketchup in pad thai
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puts ginger in pad thai
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snaps rice noodles in half
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boils rice noodles instead of soaking in warm water
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uses what looks like extra virgin olive oil to cook everything
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no tofu
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puts green onions and cilantro in the dish (the only herb that goes into pad thai is garlic chives)
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uses fresh chili instead of dried chili flakes
Every step is wrong. Every step. This is the first time I've come across a recipe of his I actually know something about and he fucks up everywhere.
I can't believe a certain orange-shirted YouTuber hasn't reviewed this yet, honestly.
This kind of shit is prime fodder for someone like hoe_math to respond to. Men who make up the bulk of an actual representative sample, to her, are Not People.
Thanks! Xi'an features in two or three of my itineraries - I've heard good things about it from most everyone, so I'll try to prioritise the plans which pass through the city.
I have watched a whole bunch of anime off the recommendations of friends and unfortunately have to concur with @George_E_Hale: Anime in general sucks. Yes, even the classics. Even the ones which are known for their stories and themes.
I will admit to having a soft spot for Ghibli movies. Those are the exception, not the norm.
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