problem_redditor
No bio...
User ID: 1083
IIRC this has also been heavily supported by all of the data collected on the topic, where the Chinese routinely rank as some of the most optimistic people in the world, in many cases taking away the top spot. I concur that there seems to be a general vibe in China that their lives in the future will be better than it is today, whereas many people in the West seem not to believe that, appear to believe their future is mainly governed by institutional forces, and take stagnation as a given.
Like OP mentioned even Rust Belt-ish depopulating industrial cities in areas like Dongbei don't seem to have this same downbeat view nor do they have the same level of self-destruction, drug use and crime that impoverished areas in the West do. There's just a lot less self-sabotage in general, IMO.
My hair is pretty nice. Just short of unmanageable East Asian straight, though I suspect that I've settled into a pompadour and fade that I'll keep well past the point it goes out of fashion.
Count yourself lucky. My hair is the most unmanageable chink hair you can possibly imagine; it stands up so straight that it looks like I've been electrocuted, even when grown out relatively long. It's impossible to style and gives me painful hair splinters that I'm constantly picking out of my fingers. I just get it all buzzed off (which poses its own problems, since short hair needs to be cut very often and my hair grows blisteringly fast).
problem_redditor
10d ago
It exists in some point in the possibility-space, in the same way that technically you can also arrive at Shakespeare's Macbeth through a random character generator. The question is why our universe happens to have taken on these specific exact properties. Making anthropic arguments to explain this primarily only makes sense to me if you postulate the existence of many other "rolls of the dice": e.g. the existence of other universes with different physical laws, or the idea that physical laws are actually not consistent throughout the universe.
You're at this point arguing against a position I haven't taken.
If there are an infinite number of tickets then the odds of any individual slob winning are virtually zero, yet win someone must.
We're basically just rehashing another one of the stock arguments yet again. Really, I'd like to see you apply that reasoning consistently across the board. Every stone in the world is idiosyncratic in its shape, so coming across a perfect cube shouldn't give you pause. If you're playing poker with someone and they get royal flushes 10 turns in a row, there's no reason to suspect cheating, since it's about as probable as any other specific configuration. Any set of hands is unlikely, right? I suppose if you detect a radio signal from the heavens that appears to be sending out primes in sequential order, you should just shrug your shoulders and go on with your day, since it could also just be random noise. Right? There's nothing to explain.
Then there's the fact that we don't even know how many drawings there have been.
Sure? Yes, the whole infinite-drawings explanation is indeed a possible solution. I'm atheist and don't think a magic man did it at all. I'm generally against jumping to conclusions on the issue; rather I'm saying there is something there which does appear to be strange, I reject assertions that there is nothing weird about the apparent fine-tuning, and note that there are a bunch of possible explanations virtually all of which can't be supported.
I don’t have nearly as much certainty as you’re imputing onto me. Perhaps model your opponent correctly first before trying to get into an argument with some imaginary creationist.
That doesn't actually help anything though, because even if it were the case, then I'd just want to know where the hell he came from and what was going on before that.
This is certainly a problem with the religious explanation. It would be more convincing as an argument if infinite regress wasn't also a problem that plagued all cosmologies.
By basic twiddling you mean your absolutely wild and seemingly totally unexamined belief that the laws of physics are arbitrary and were determined by RNG at the Big Bang.
If you're willing to throw out any ability to make any basic Bayesian inferences sure that argument holds water.
And anyway, there's definitionally no such thing as a universe where life is impossible and anyone is around to notice it.
Yes, I see you're cycling through all the stock criticisms that have been levelled ad nauseam. I have always thought this usage of anthropic reasoning was completely flawed. Facts that we deduce from our existence do not explain why we exist at all. The conditional statement "if physical observers then an observer-permitting universe" does not answer the question "why observers?" The anthropic argument explains why we don’t observe a life-prohibiting universe, but it doesn’t explain why a life-permitting one exists.
But some basic twiddling with these free parameters results in universes with barely any chemistry at all. Consider the cosmological constant: a seemingly small increase leads to a universe with no structure whatsoever, and a small decrease (to negative values) leads to no universe whatsoever. If you decrease the mass of the down quark by 8 percent you end up with no atoms. The vast majority of these proposed universes are so simple that there is nowhere for alternative life forms to hide.
But even absent that, no math presently exists for this kind of speculation on the matter.
Both you and @JustGottaDoot have raised this objection, and sure, we just have a sample of n=1 and as such we don't have any frequency data through which to ground the idea that the free parameters of our universe are determined in an RNG-like way and are as such extremely low probability.
This is just where noninformative priors come in, where absent any available frequency distribution your first assumption should be the simplest one, say, that the probability of every given outcome is 1/n (n being the number of values a parameter can take). Bayesian reasoning about prior probabilities like those are very useful heuristics to build off and show up in a good number of applications, including in theoretical physics. A lot of scientific investigation could simply not work without specifying initial beliefs about an uncertain parameter, there's a reason why the maximum entropy principle is so common.
In other words, I think this objection proves too much, and throws out the core idea backing many useful Bayesian inferences. That doesn't mean I think the explanation is "God" (it is funny that I'm the atheist arguing for fine-tuning and you're the Catholic arguing against it though), but it does appear to me that there is something there worth explaining.
The main difference in my mind isn't about complexity or whether God is personal, the distinction for me is whether the process that created us had sapience involved in it somewhere. An infinite, impersonal multiverse might be very complex, but it doesn't have thoughts or an agenda, it just is. God would be an agent that acts intentionally, whether it makes sense to pray to said God or expect divine intervention on your behalf is another matter entirely.
To be honest if that fine-tuning version of God exists I have some very strong words prepared. Imagine if a mad scientist created a simulation where millions of sapient suffering beings compete with each other to maximise inclusive genetic fitness and then let it run unchecked. What the fuck.
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling. Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is.
I'm not sure this is all that compelling; it makes some psychological sense that you would pinpoint consciousness as the strongest argument here, given your prior statement about finding no phenomenon "to be as interesting as other people". But it's unclear why this has to imply the existence of a God, just because something isn't yet understood and possesses weird properties does not mean you have to invoke a deity to explain its existence. As an atheist myself I think the strongest argument in favour of theism is some sort of cosmological fine-tuning argument pointing to aspects of the universe that seem extremely improbable, but without which human life would not be possible (you seem to have mentioned this as a theist argument, but for some reason appear to have deprioritised it relative to the argument from consciousness).
A big example of this is the triple-alpha process, which is how carbon gets formed in stars - it begins when two helium-4 nuclei (alpha particles) fuse to produce beryllium-8, which is highly unstable and decays with a half life of 8.19×10−17 seconds, but sometimes a third alpha particle enters the fray and produces something called the Hoyle state, which is a "resonance state" of carbon-12. This resonance state also almost always decays back into three alpha particles, but sometimes it settles into a stable form of carbon-12 that then eventually gets dispersed into the interstellar medium in the latter half of a stellar lifecycle. There are many apparent coincidences in every step of this process - probably the most mentioned one is that the resonance state has to occur at a very specific range of energies for sufficient carbon to be produced. It occurs at 7.656 megaelectronvolts (MeV), and the triple-alpha process is very sensitive to this value. Vary it by 0.1 MeV and the reaction will slow, producing less carbon, and a change of more than 0.3 MeV will halt carbon production altogether. There are also other constants here where, if they were even slightly different, would mean that most carbon would have been converted to oxygen.
There are also other examples of this, like the strong nuclear force's specific value seeming almost perfectly calibrated for stable atomic nuclei and stellar nucleosynthesis, and where a change of even ~2% in its value pretty much destroys all life. And these aren't rare to find, there are so many fine-tuned elements of the universe you can point to if you want to strengthen the argument. The emergence of life at all seems to have been an exceptionally low-probability (read: downright infinitesimal) event based on a constellation of fundamental physical constants, all of which basically had to be balanced on a knife's edge in order for it to appear. Almost as if it was intelligently designed.
Now you can explain all this through some form of anthropic argument invoking an infinity of hypothetical universes (for example), but it's unproven any of them exist and as such the epistemic status of these multiverse explanations is actually not quite too far from asserting the existence of a creator God. You could speculate that hypothetically different sets of physical fundamentals could result in different sets of lifeforms we aren't familiar with, but actually many of the other parameters result in the universe degrading into some high-entropy or low-energy state that doesn't permit the existence of sufficiently complex structures, and in any case that's just guessing again. Cosmological fine-tuning doesn't prove God, but it's at least a clear absurdity that deserves explanation, and this time God is actually a relatively plausible and intuitive explanation for the observed phenomenon since all our possible answers are also just unfalsifiable bad guesses.
I've never been particularly emotionally moved by a singular painting. But I have been moved by a collection of related paintings placed within a certain context, and I have been moved by singular pieces of architecture and monumental sculpture.
I think I'm similar in this regard, and the Louvre fell flat for me as well. It was difficult to connect with many of the paintings there; in spite of the clear dedication of the artists, many of them were relatively small in size and unintimidating, and I came away thinking that the overwhelming focus of these artists when painting these was primarily on the formal qualities of the work. I could appreciate it and the paintings were certainly beautiful, but they largely did not affect me. It sometimes feels as if artists can get interested enough with the microscale qualities of the art that they fail to make use of many simple and "primitive" tricks that can elicit emotion. When travelling Europe I much preferred many of the murals and stained-glass works in churches, since they were far larger and often made to dwarf the viewer with visions of religious awe. My favourite piece of art in Paris was not the refined Renaissance art in the Louvre, it was the gigantic medieval stained glass panels in Sainte-Chapelle.
Scale is something that really does affect your emotional perceptions of a piece of art. Hell, the Great Wall is just a fortification built for entirely functional purposes, and yet seeing it snake over the ridgeline for as far as the eye could see had a significant emotional effect. And as far as art goes, there isn't much of anything I've seen that can compare to something like, say, Cave 6 of the Yungang Grottoes. Standing deep inside the bowels of a remote, dusty mountain in rural China and gazing up at this gargantuan 1,500 year-old cavern adorned with resplendent, colourful images of celestial figures spilling unbidden into every nook and cranny was incredibly stirring. It was like heaven carved into the side of a mountain.
The authoritarian/libertarian debate is one that has raged on forever and seems unlikely to be resolved soon, and note I'm actually not fully unconvinced of the more classical auth position as a general rule of governance. But an argument for denying the public their preferences with regards to art would actually need to include some convincing case that something like Zones of Immersion carries overall positive utility (I suppose Stuart Reid would say it raises awareness of the current social state of atomisation and isolation), whereas I would say that message is not being picked up by the public, or if it is, it's being received with annoyance and dismissal, and as such its existence is mildly negative utility-wise. I'd say many modern art installations are similarly net negative utility.
In order to "benefit the public through art" and "civilise the masses", you don't need to always fully cater to the public, but you need it to connect with them in a somewhat productive manner or the message will be lost. For a far more successful example of this, Mexican muralism is right there; these pieces of public art were meant to promote national identity and revolutionary ideals. Whether I agree with all of those ideals is another matter, I would say they largely succeeded at getting the message through to a receptive public, and there is a certain populist quality to that entire movement that makes it easy to engage with on the intended level. The aspects of modern art that allow it to be a vehicle for signalling taste is the very thing that disqualifies it as being an effective tool for social improvement. It just has too many hoe scaring qualities.
Okay, but beauty was never the goal of it, it's not failing at being beautiful, it's just playing a different game entirely. And the posted picture is the most ugly part, the rest are somewhat more colorful. You can read about it here:
I was in Toronto two years ago and actually gazed upon at the whole mural in person, it covers the length of the visible tube and I thought it was all terrible (the posted picture actually isn't the most ugly part in my opinion); in addition I also had a look at the artist's page right after since I wanted to see what was up with the mural after being confronted with it on the subway.
And yes, I agree it's playing a different game entirely. A non-trivial amount of contemporary art isn't playing at being beautiful and this one certainly isn't; it is indeed very successful at inducing misery and in that sense the goal was achieved. But as evidenced by the comments, it completely conflicts with what the public wants for themselves on their morning commute, thus the radical feeling of disconnection from the public I mentioned in my prior post.
Nothing about Angelus Novus moves me, but there's so many albums that move me, while I doubt most people would even be willing to stand to listen to it for more than a few moments.
My music taste is strange enough that nobody passes me the aux cord anymore and they haven't for a decade now. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to create their own art free from the preferences of the majority! Far from it. I enjoy a lot of these weird communities where people can innovate.
It's more that if we must evaluate beauty in some way (that doesn't involve appointing one group of elites as the arbiter of taste), I can't think of any other coherent way to do so outside of a simple appeal-to-majority; it at least intuitively makes sense and seems most likely to separate apart the components of aesthetic sentiments that are universally held vs. those that are culturally acquired within a certain context. But nobody ever seems to be happy with that either and every conversation about art eventually devolves into incoherence anyway because majoritarianism is an exceptionally restrictive framework for art, so perhaps discussing the quality of art is ultimately always a fruitless endeavour.
I don't think the elitism was extremely different in earlier centuries either. Elitism is pretty much a constant and the difference is just that status has shifted from "signalling wealth" to "signalling taste" (and the time and wealth necessary to develop said taste). The difference here is, as you mention, that the metagame was at a different place back then which would have brought it more in line with your average person's aesthetic preferences, and it is understandable that the things elites venerate end up being far more controversial when what they do starts significantly diverging from the preferences of the masses.
The more the public disagrees with the elites, the less justifiable the elitism is going to seem. And currently the elites are becoming increasingly incomprehensible to the average member of the public. I don't believe that your average member of the laity would have considered the murals in their local cathedral or temple to be ugly, but I certainly do believe that most people think the mural in Toronto's Union Station is ugly.
I find myself in two minds about this. I'm somebody who likes a lot of weird aleatoric experimental electronic music, enjoys foreign arthouse and slow cinema from Russia and China (Tarkovsky's Stalker and Hu Bo's An Elephant Sitting Still were two that recently really caught my eye, the latter being almost four hours long), and has a particular affinity towards extremely weird and sometimes punishing aesthetic experiences. I also, however, detest Angelus Novus, think the vast majority of modern architectural "gems" are irredeemably ugly, grew up in Southeast Asia eating the tastiest cheapest food sitting on a plastic chair on the side of the street, think that food critics are absolute wankers, and believe that appealing to context is a terrible retort when people say a piece of art didn't click with them. Art is ultimately an experience, and should be evaluated on the emotional reaction that it provides you, not necessarily the importance level of the art in some abstract sense.
Of course, even if you limit your appreciation only to your instant kneejerk reaction to a piece of art, the Historical and Cultural Context™ people are still very obviously correct. Even when you're trying to go off your first reactions, ultimately no one is capable of appreciating art in a vacuum, everyone approaches it with a set of assumptions and learned cultural background that informs how they interpret the art. The art and entertainment of a certain culture inevitably carries with it cultural baggage that an outsider isn't likely to understand, and trying to understand something like Beijing Opera from a western perspective is basically like trying to decode alien entertainment; it would probably seem deeply unpleasant on a first viewing absent any of the cultural pillars it was built upon. As an example of the very reverse, Giuseppe Castiglione had to adapt his painting style while in the Qing court because the Qianlong Emperor thought the strong shadows of chiaroscuro painting, popular in Europe at the time, looked like dirt. You can see Japanese like Shiba Kokan stating "Western pictures operate on a highly theoretical level, and no-one should view them off-handedly" and penning instructions on how to correctly view and interpret European paintings, which were clearly not intuitive to them. A lot of people here sometimes seem overly convinced of the transcendent nature of Renaissance painting traditions, but these are not universally beautiful or perfectly realistic - they operate on conventions that are indeed culturally learned (though this is not to overstate the argument: there are also many common threads in many artistic traditions that are likely biologically founded).
But even if you grant that art connoisseurs' tastes are not summed up by bullshit political signalling and grant that their evaluations are founded on their contextual interpretation of art, taste-makers still do not sit in an unassailable ivory tower, with their One True interpretation of art backed by their deep understanding of artistic and historical context that everyone else necessarily has to agree with or share. To make it crystal clear what I mean by this, I do not think most professional food critics as they stand today could accurately evaluate what counts as good in, say, the Southeast Asian context; I don't believe they could even correctly pin down what Southeast Asians consider as "good dining atmosphere" when so many people in that culture have very fond memories of street food, and the social spaces they enable within the community. Should "food critics" be provided the cultural clout to grant accolades based on their inappropriate understanding of the local context in which it is enjoyed, steeped as they are in the French haute tradition? There's a reason why no Asian gives a shit about Michelin stars, and I would argue the same tension exists between the public and the critics even within the same culture, who largely exist in different social worlds and have different conceptions of what art should be. And while this is relatively harmless in many cases - they're not forcing the public to engage with their milieu, though their high social standing does influence things a bit - it gets particularly bad when these people are contracted to design public art and public architecture that is ostensibly supposed to serve the people but ends up serving only the specific milieu that the artist runs in. Your average person actually does possess an understanding of context that helps them interpret works, it's just not necessarily the context that art critics use.
Unfortunately many artists and critics are capable of falling into the trap of viewing their ideas and aesthetic preferences as representing some cosmic universal and metaphysical Truth, even when they parrot the canard that Art Is Subjective. Klee himself was extremely guilty of this, with his notebooks including incredible bangers like "The nowhere-existent something or the somewhere-existent nothing is a non-conceptual concept of freedom from opposition. If we express it in terms of the perceptible (as though drawing up a balance sheet of chaos), we arrive at the concept grey, at the fateful point between coming-into-being and passing-away: the grey point. The point is grey because it is neither white nor black or because it is white and black at the same time. It is grey because it is neither up nor down or because it is both up and down. It is grey because it is a non-dimensional point, a point between the dimensions." Much of the Cultural and Social Context people in practice level that assertion to imply that in order to understand art, you need to internalise the correct meta. But the idea that there is some privileged method of interpreting art, some framework through which some "art criticism" can be more valid than others, is ridiculous and antithetical to the way art functions. Invoking cultural context doesn’t make you right about the art. It’s just elevating the shared context and value system of the social circle in which you belong over that of another.
In short, art critics do not represent some class of individuals endowed with superior taste or knowledge who have the ability to determine what is good art for the unwashed masses, they are simply their own idiosyncratic cultural milieu that operates on their own set of values and shared context that in fact differ greatly from what most people consider important, and it skews their aesthetic evaluations away from the evaluations of the majority of people. Their ideas of beauty and artistic profundity are built off previous works and ideas that were lauded and developed primarily within that sphere, and they ignore the artistic context and discursive circles which the majority of people use when they interpret art. You mention art people having a unique openness to being transformed by art, but the ever-popular assertion in these circles that something is "kitsch" is itself a resistance to allowing oneself to be Transformed by a piece of art based on one's own mental conceptions of what art should (not) look like.
It is ultimately the elitism of the whole affair that I think turns people against it, after all they are lauding things that are so alienating to the majority of people that they find it outright ugly, and yet these artists and critics are esteemed to such a degree as if their opinion somehow holds more weight than that of your average person - to the point that they will sometimes be allowed to force their aesthetic preferences through at the expense of everyone else. And if we must evaluate art on some scale, I actually find myself most sympathetic to the idea of pure majoritarianism when it comes to taste; the only meaningful way to measure beauty is to evaluate it through what the eyes of the majority consider beautiful, and that would change the ranking of esteemed art in a way that would very hugely deprioritise the opinions of art critics.
I have always found this question to mostly assess which individuals have such strong feelings of personal moral culpability that it will push them to make objectively irrational decisions. My answer is clearly and obviously red, because my individual vote does not count and is unlikely to sway anything when everyone in the world is taking the poll. That is 8.3 billion people. The outcome is dichotomous. There is, for all intents and purposes, zero chance my vote will influence the end result at all, and so it's literally just a choice between "Live/Possibly Die".
No-brainer, to be honest. The only way anyone can even begin to mount a convincing argument for blue is by explaining how my vote will have a material effect on the final outcome, and I doubt you can argue that.
In spite of its critical and commercial success I think The French Connection (1971) epitomises a bunch of the worst tendencies of film of this era, I have never been able to get into it. The extremely shaky, low-quality and chaotic cinematography is relentless, and gets tiring to look at after five minutes; in similar fashion the audio is very crunchy. Pacing and plot-wise, it's an otherwise uneventful police procedural that's often disjointed, drags unnecessarily and is saved every now and then by brief spurts of action (I did not actually make it to the famous car chase scene, because I was so underwhelmed by the rest of it). I'm sure this film has its lovers here, but so much of the filming and pacing felt so undercurated that it came off almost like a B-movie at some points.
You can even see some of these tendencies show up in blockbuster crowdpleasers of the era like The Sting (1973). It's not nearly as bad technically and definitely is paced far better, costuming and set dressing is nice, but there's a sort of 1970s stink to it still: it generally feels like it lacks a huge amount of intentionality in the staging department, it's packed full of dialogue that - in its attempts to be authentic/gritty - falls into a middle ground that's neither realistic enough to be believable or dramatic enough to be charming, and just feels like a rather simple caper movie that moves a good bit slower than it should. I am sure time has hurt both of these movies, and I am sure someone else here enjoys these for the very reasons I don't. But referring back to my previous example of Hitchcock, Psycho is old and cheesy as hell, and yet I still find myself thinking "That's some nice framing and presentation" at multiple points during the film (e.g. the shot of the water swirling down the shower drain, which fades into Marion's lifeless eye staring at the viewer while the camera twirls). Also, the man knew how to fucking block a scene. 1970s movies, on the other hand, are just lacking in this same kind of deliberateness.
It's obvious that films of the era were trying to incorporate more subversive elements and experiment with innovative approaches to filmmaking. But there's a fundamental identity crisis at its core, where much of it maintains the quality of trying to be viscerally crowdpleasing while at the same time incorporating some superficial aspects of art cinema into it (slow pacing, lingering shots focusing on small details, irresolution and nonlinearity) without the precise, fine-tuned control and stubborn commitment to a deeply individual aesthetic vision that makes art cinema fascinating even if you end up bouncing off the film. A lot of it is just a very unhappy middle ground for me.
Don't get me started on the zoom-ins of the 70s, one of the corniest filmmaking devices employed in that era. Jittery handheld style is all over many films of that era as well, for what it's worth, especially those who wanted to emulate the new wave feel.
I liked Breaking Bad enough but the cinematography was not the strong point. Some of the filmography on Gilligan's new project Pluribus possibly surpasses the lows of Breaking Bad, this scene in particular where Carol is on the rooftop reminds me of The Room; the green screen is executed so sloppily that Carol outright does not have a shadow. Then there is this, which is somehow even worse. The per episode budget was $15 million.
Honestly, I struggle to watch films made before the 1980-90s. Comedies tend not to age well for reasons of cultural change (with notable exceptions, e.g. the Python films or Airplane!) and dramas need to have a really compelling script to allow me to forgive the fact that filmmaking was just worse back then. Maybe part of it may be my ruined modern attention span, but I think filmmaking has genuinely improved.
For me, I think this mostly just applies to movies made in the late 60s-70s. It's dated now, but I find that a lot of movies before that period don't have the same problem with filmmaking that the 1970s stuff did - for example Hitchcock's oeuvre for the most part feels like the work of an extremely competent and confident filmmaker with a large amount of control over the medium. Even as late as 1966, I find many films to be eminently watchable (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, for example).
It was when New Hollywood started really exploding in popularity that I truly find films start appearing very overly indulgent; apart from a select few movies that are classics, there's an almost intolerable amount of sloppy poorly-framed low-budget guerrilla cinematography passed off as grittiness, horrible audio mixing that renders the voices barely audible, bloated pacing that includes extraneous shots of lazy improvisation and oceans of irrelevant dialogue that are kept for "authenticity's sake", and other such elements that make them difficult to watch. Say what you want about the studio control of the Golden Age and how it Stifled Revolutionaries, I think that era reined in the worst impulses of auteurs and forced them to become a bit more economical and deliberate with their filmmaking.
That being said, nothing is worse than the overly-saturated, uniformly-lit, plastic CGI look that modern Hollywood specialises in.
You have a more balanced take on China than most here, I think. Probably because you have actually been to the country. Looks like you've had a good time.
I did have a good time, I’ll probably be back again this year. And having a more balanced take on China than most here is not too difficult; in general much of the 外网 has a tendency to paint China as Great Satan. It happens pretty often with countries that don’t align themselves with the U.S.
To provide some background, I am ethnically Hokkien, though not of Mainland origin (so don't expect me to speak putonghua well). I'm Malaysian Chinese and was born and raised there, which kind of makes me a good control group since we didn't experience the revolution. And my relatively conciliatory attitude towards the mainland is largely consistent with that background - most of us Straits Chinese don't appear to have the same adversarial attitude towards the mainland that Taiwanese or the Western-integrated parts of the diaspora do.
We're mostly not disagreeing, I think. I'll just take this opportunity to elaborate on what has been a large hobbyhorse of mine for the last little bit. As noted I am not a mainlander so I have limited experience on the ground there (apart from my travels), but I do have experience with the region in general which contextualises my view of the mainland.
There’s a good number of things in your list that I think would have happened anyway, Maoism or not.
For tangible losses, I'll spare us both the time. I believe Wikipedia has a page on artifacts destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. But that's not actually the main point.
Tangible losses were definitely a thing during the Cultural Revolution, not disputing that. But I'm primarily looking at this from a comparative perspective derived from travelling extensively through Asia; I'm well acquainted with the region, and it's very common to find that much tangible heritage has completely vanished in all of the Asian countries I've visited, sometimes due to iconoclasm or warfare, sometimes due to modernisation. Travelling the larger East Asia region has been pretty eye-opening, and in spite of everything, I find the mainland probably has the largest concentration of well-preserved extant East Asian architecture.
But as somebody that's specifically invested in Chinese culture, wants to see it flourish and has been dismayed by the scale of loss, I understand why your position is the way it is, and why you would focus in on China specifically.
The Chinese aesthetics I love deeply are not what the median Chinese person understands or prefers today. Take any Chinese city you've visited. Almost all of them, except a select few in the Yangtze Delta, are ugly by my standards: a strange amalgamation of cargo-cult Western style, remnants of Communist-era aesthetics, and some uninformed, almost orientalist imagination of what "Chinese" culture should look like, eg those replica “old towns”.
I assume by the select few in the Yangtze Delta you mean Suzhou, Yangzhou, perhaps Hangzhou’s West Lake and a bunch of the water towns in the surrounds. For my part I would add Pingyao to that list (touristy but the historic quarter there is the most complete in all of Asia), in addition I think Quanzhou and Langzhong belong there too. Southern Anhui, Zhejiang, Fujian and Yunnan provinces have a very large number of rather well-preserved and non-rebuilt villages. Actually quite a lot of them. But yeah most Chinese cities are not designed like that, the vast majority of people live and work in anonymised concrete blocks. I do understand why this is the case though, and I don't think it's a matter of aesthetic preference as much as it is pure necessity. Massive crowds show up anywhere there's even a sliver of traditional architecture in China.
The problem is that Asian architecture, as much as I love it myself, is decidedly a premodern architecture and adapting it to modern standards often presents a serious challenge. Traditional Asian vernacular architecture often sits flat and low to the ground; it's fundamentally a single-story, at best double-story affair made largely of earth and timber, with the exception of some unique architectural typologies that were built primarily for defensive purposes, like the diaolou or tulou. Throughout the modernisation period there has been a large number of attempts to bring Asian aesthetics into the modern era; on the mainland these attempts stretch all the way back to Republican China where Chinese architecture was often adapted to contemporary needs by simply tacking Chinese-styled roofs onto a modern concrete structure (see: Wuhan University), which inevitably end up looking a bit strange. They are largely not suited for extremely high-density urban living, and a major goal of many East Asian governments during their modernisation period was to urbanise and industrialise a very agricultural, rural population.
Traditional Asian architecture is just not a scalable solution when you're quickly trying to urbanise 1/5ths of the world's population. A city like Beijing that houses over double the population of Greece is large and unwieldy enough as it is with these looming high-rises, trying to build in hutong style throughout the city would create serious logistical and infrastructural problems. Even the already-existing hutongs are a challenge to deal with. The standard of living in unrenovated hutongs is noticeably lower than the surrounding areas; many residents are just crammed into one sihueyuan, share one very dirty public toilet and often lack proper plumbing and other amenities. I understand the Chinese government's need to modernise these hutongs, but often the task of renovation is challenging, and in order to comprehensively meet residents' needs you just end up fucking up the space badly anyway. Preserving old houses such that they still can be lived in while still remaining authentic is a difficult tightrope to walk, especially in the Asian context. I do however think the government's policies on hutongs have gotten better as the years have gone on; they appear to be increasingly prioritising renovations over just wholesale tearing down a neighbourhood and rebuilding it.
The homogenisation of China's cities is one aspect though where I'm pretty certain the lion's share of the blame can be placed on the pressures of modernisation and not on Maoism, especially considering how large the population they were trying to urbanise was. Seoul and Incheon and Hong Kong possess much of the same features as any mainland Chinese city, repeated tall tower blocks dominate the landscape. Tokyo is a hyper-concreted sprawl of a city featuring a globalised turn-of-the-century aesthetic. Singapore never experienced such a revolution, and yet its cityscape and aesthetics are also noticeably globalised, high-rise and rather Western; big cities in Malaysia are much the same way. Apart from a small handful of heritage buildings here and there, Kuala Lumpur is increasingly becoming a modern city built in a modern fashion, and the newer the construction, the less local identity there is. IMO no country in Asia has managed to successfully tackle the task of respectfully adapting Asian architecture to modern life and high-density living thus far. The very weird modern parodies of "Oriental" architecture that receive such backlash in Asia are an attempt at precisely this, and they're not limited to China in the slightest. Malaysia and Singapore's more modern temple constructions often look like the Disneylandified architecture people complain about in China (see: Kek Lok Si, Penang; Thean Hou Temple, Kuala Lumpur; Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, Singapore). We're really not doing any better in that regard, and I honestly think some of the new traditional-style construction in China actually can look better and more authentic.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not the biggest fan of how many Asian cities look, and I often do wish they could have retained more of a traditional character. But the kinds of pressures that Asian countries generally faced weren't trivial; they possessed very large and very rural populations that they needed to quickly bring into the modern day, and in that light their decision-making starts to look a lot more understandable. Ruthless utilitarianism perhaps, but what else could they have done?
How many of us have read the entire Dialects? The 四书五经, which every scholar in the old days could recite? I can tell you confidently that even among the most educated Chinese, the graduates of Tsinghua and Peking, the number is surprisingly low for the former and almost unheard of outside of people who study Chinese and history for the latter. I'm trying my best to regain it. Maybe it's because I hold a higher standard than most, but I find it disturbing how much Western literature and culture I've absorbed while my knowledge of Chinese literature remains comparatively sparse compared to Chinese back in the days that are in the same social stratum. Also I suspect I am simply more sensitive to what has been lost than you might be, if you're not Chinese yourself.
The general disinterest in traditional Chinese literature is something that's occurring in a lot of places unfortunately; all I can really say in response is that there’s barely anybody in the Straits who has actually read the bulk of the Four Books and Five Classics either and I would be surprised if you found someone who had ever done that, particularly among the younger generations. I’ve had a gander at the Analects, and I’m pretty certain that makes me more Sinophilic than most of my peers. I’m also not aware of any Malaysian Chinese who are proficient in, say, the 四艺. And unlike the situation in the Mainland, where it seems that levels of interest in traditional culture are higher among the younger generation, if anything in the overseas diaspora the youth are less likely to have read any Chinese classics, and less likely to engage deeply with the culture than their forebears; that’s old person shit. Granted, I can't speak for Taiwan and have no experience with it, but it appears from my limited engagement with their politics that they're slowly deprioritising the classics in education as a part of "de-sinicisation", whereas in contrast it seems the opposite has been occurring on the mainland; guoxue has started to gain some steam, and the number of classics included in the gaokao has grown.
Again, this is not to downplay the losses that have occurred. China has changed a lot in the modern era, and I certainly sympathise with culture revivalists. But in this regard, the mainland really isn't too different from the diaspora. Honestly the replica old towns and Xiaohongshu hanfu-wearing girls is actually a good sign I think, even if it does at times look like a quite distasteful parody of Chinese aesthetics, it's at least a signal that there is some latent interest in engaging with the traditional aspects of Chinese culture again.
It’s not uncommon to hear the sentiment that many practices have been preserved in overseas Chinese communities, but speaking as one myself, frankly I don’t think we’re preserving all that much. It's possible we have some stuff that’s no longer on the mainland, but the reverse is true too and possibly to a greater degree - for example I had never heard of the youshen festival or Yingge dance until doing research into China, as far as I can tell Straits Chinese simply don’t practice these things much at all despite many of them being able to trace back their heritage to Fujian/Chaoshan where they're a very visible aspect of traditional culture. I really don’t know if we’re any more authentically Chinese than the Southern Chinese on the mainland are, coastal Southeastern China has preserved a lot of stuff I’ve barely heard about before.
I agree that modern China barely qualifies as communist, and mainlanders care way more about the Chinese nation-building project than they do communism as an end-goal. However, I do want to touch on a tangential comment here as an excuse to talk about something that annoys me:
He destroyed a huge fraction of meaningful Chinese culture, but that impulse was not atypical for 20th century Chinese intellectuals, who believed the root of all ills of the Chinese state was Chinese culture itself, who wanted to abandon Chinese characters, Chinese clothing, and Chinese ways of thinking.
I always hear this stated, but in spite of its popularity as an idea I've never actually heard anyone base this off any proper quantification of the mentioned losses in Chinese culture, and this sentiment is often expressed by people with a clear China Bad agenda to illustrate the illegitimacy of the modern Chinese state and to distance it from the history its people seem to derive a huge amount of national identity from. It's not incorrect that Mao's actions were often destructive, it's also not incorrect that criticism of Chinese tradition was a huge trend in early 20th-century Chinese thought (and not just communist ones), but in general I actually think Chinese culture has proven surprisingly resilient in the turmoil of the 20th century. In the Deng era there was a huge resurgence of many religions and ideas that had been thoroughly criticised throughout the Cultural Revolution, Confucianism being a big one. This article makes a pretty good argument that it never "died out", and its resurgence was less revival and more an example of ancient tradition experiencing organic evolution through the stressors of the 20th century. I also remember reading a book about Cultural Revolution culture that basically argued that it was often based off aspects of traditional culture (such as the yangbanxi model plays being based off Beijing Opera), which often had the ironic effect of indirectly inducing more interest in traditional Chinese culture in many of those who were exposed to it. That book also contained a large number of anecdotes from people suggesting that in practice they maintained a lot of traditional customs in the countryside outside of the purview of authorities during the CR, that in spite of the official party line they continued to practice what they knew. Chinese culture survives reasonably well in my opinion, and there are many visible manifestations of that in the rural celebrations and religious festivities that still continue within the country.
It's also helpful to consider how China fits into larger East Asian context in this regard. Pretty much no East Asian country survived its modernisation period intact; even Japan, a country which is (IMO incorrectly) perceived as uniquely preservationist, was no stranger to iconoclastic campaigns that criticised Japanese culture and in general had its culture hugely altered in virtually every way during modernisation. I would say that many aspects of Japanese culture that exist today and are thought to be ancient practice date back 20th/late 19th century at earliest, given the immense change the Meiji period wrought. It's known that Meiji destroyed a large amount of feudal castles, but he also issued a shinbutsu bunri doctrine forcibly separating Shintoism and Buddhism, pretty much ending the centuries-long syncretism that had characterised Japanese religion; this separation continues into the modern day. Due to the Buddhists' deep association with the Tokugawa shogunate, there was a period of violent iconoclasm against Buddhists and their relics known as haibutsu kishaku, which saw approx 40,000 temples and their relics destroyed; there are some Japanese prefectures completely lacking extant pre-Meiji Buddhist temples for that reason. Shintoism was reformed and repurposed into a cult of the emperor (State Shinto), an alliance which Buddhists also tried to emulate for survival, and this period also saw Buddhist priests brought down to the level of the laity once the Meiji state abolished the dictums that priests should avoid meat and remain celibate. To this day, Shinto as a distinct and unitary religion is actually a modern concept whose organisation derives from Meiji-era State Shinto. Japanese Buddhism is still characterised by the lack of its Vinaya Pitaka disciplinary code for practitioners, and they often eat meat, which is very not in line with Mahayana tradition. Many other related aspects of Japanese culture that are seen as traditional are actually modern - for example the association of torii gates and shimenawa ropes with Shinto shrines or the custom that Shintoists wear white while Buddhists wear black are actually distinctions that really only stem from Meiji period separation policy. There's also other things I could talk about, such as the forced closures and decline of food-cart yatai culture, or the adoption of Gregorian dates for the Japanese new year and heavy westernisation of the celebration.
All this is to say that sure China did not survive the 20th century unscathed, but deep cultural modification is something that occurred in most East Asian countries during their modernisation, I don't think it's at all a given that China has been the most modified by modernity or iconoclasm in the region. It's always very jarring whenever I see the "death of Chinese culture" being brought up; the amount of times it gets mentioned is just disproportionate relative to the degree of cultural loss it experienced, especially when you compare it with the rest of East Asia.
I really can't come up with a clear answer to this. Pretty much anything by Tate McCrae or Sabrina Carpenter or virtually anybody else in this new generation of pop artists is about as aggressively painful as it gets, to be honest. After a while everything melts away into the same homogenised corpus of liquidised shit that is modern pop music. It's virtually all irredeemable, there's no sense talking about "worse" or "better" in such a context.
At least stuff that's unintentionally but parodically bad such as Liz Phair's lyrical and musical masterpieces (Bollywood, U Hate It) are fun to listen to, these songs can't even aspire to that.
Google Earth is a thing. Having a monitor/phone and other modern tech actually decreases the relative utility of a flat map projection, as opposed to the days of yesteryear where it would have been much more convenient to carry an easily storable map around instead of an unwieldy globe, and most people's practical use of maps would (usually) have been in local small-scale contexts where the distortion would have been negligible. Now, though? I wonder why there are any map apps that don't project their satellite imagery onto a sphere.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but I got to halfway through Tarkovsky's Stalker and turned it off. I managed to read Roadside Picnic and play Shadow of Chernobyl all the way through, but the movie was different. The book and game resembled books and games pretty well, but the movie was extremely slow, shot weirdly, with characters that didn't really have names, with dialogue that wasn't particularly interesting to me.
I definitely get it, it's a weird niche movie that's extremely slow-paced and abstruse; I have a hard time justifying recommending it to anyone because of that. Your general perceptions of the movie probably correlates with how much patience you have for arthouse, and how much you enjoy the vibe (which is the aspect that carries the entire movie). For the most part, I wasn't expecting to like it either. I don't usually like exceptionally pretentious types of media and consider myself sort of ambivalent on arthouse (some are good, some aren't) and I'd heard Stalker was a particularly difficult one to get through. So imagine my surprise when I'd finished the whole thing and felt as if only an hour had passed, it was very dreamlike.
I suppose part of the reason why I had a different takeaway was because I conceptualised the movie in a bit of a different way than I do other films? It kind of felt a bit like a fable or myth to me, and I engaged with it as such. Your familiarity with the source material probably also has an impact since I never read Roadside Picnic and never built up any expectations.
Warning: Shitty vent post, typed out hastily in a hotel somewhere in rural Australia.
Last Friday a good number of things happened at work that sent my anxiety levels through the roof, all of which were caused or exacerbated by the decentralised structure of public tax accounting, which features a system where one preparer works under a number of reviewers on different jobs (which can be anything from a tax return to a business activity statement to a tax planning task).
So the inciting incident for this cascade of bullshit is that I had booked five days of leave a good while ago, and I had followed the proper procedure by sending a leave form to my most direct superior that then got sent to the firm’s secretary for dissemination. But somehow one of my managers didn’t seem to know about this due to some kind of error in internal communication (or so I was told when I asked about it), and as a result I had to perform emergency handovers of some tax returns I was working on one day before I went on leave (since this was the case, I have offered to assist periodically with work when I can make myself available). This has never occurred before and in all previous instances my superiors appeared to know I would be going on leave before I even had to inform them, but it appears I cannot rely on internal communication and will need to take things into my own hands in the future. Somehow I feel this issue is going to end up being placed on me in the end as the junior. “Doesn’t communicate well” or something.
In addition, I got bitched out by one of my managers that same day for dropping one of the 5000 balls I’ve been juggling in the course of my work, and forgetting to send out a reminder email to a client for a business activity statement while sidetracked with other extremely urgent work that had to be completed and this meant the necessary client information arrived late. The lodgement date came due over my leave period, and he stated that he would now “have to” work on the client’s business activity statement in my stead in spite of the fact that applying for an extension of the due date is an option. I consider this criticism to be rather hypocritical since just less than a month ago his own failure to sign and approve a lodgement email had resulted in this same client lodging an instalment activity statement two months past the tax office-approved due date, and the only reason why it got solved is because I noticed the issue; I suppose the mistake is only unacceptable when it’s mine. Nevertheless I stayed at work four hours late that day just trying to placate him and getting the workpaper to at least a reviewable state, though why the firm couldn’t just ask for a due date extension from the ATO is unclear to me (requesting extensions is not uncommon at all; ostensibly the reason for not seeking extension in this case is not to jeopardise the payment plan the client has with the ATO, but if lodging an instalment activity statement two months late doesn’t jeopardise it, I seriously doubt this will either). He was also not happy I “got to their tax compliance late” meaning I deprioritised this client’s tax return in favour of meeting the year-end lodgement dates for other taxpayers, a decision I fully stand by, since this client is nearly insolvent and I would prefer to prioritise clients that actually pay us and not ones who are in arrears for a year’s worth of billings.
I consider both of these to be prime examples of how the multiple reporting lines of public accounting firms really messes everything up. Firstly, you report to so many people that when one person doesn’t get tied into what you’re doing due to some breakdown in internal communication it ends up causing issues. Secondly, it misaligns incentives really badly - different clients are assigned to different managers that then get delegated to you, and while on a firm level it’s better to prioritise clients that actually do pay you as compared to clients whose status as a going concern is in serious question, on an individual-manager level everybody just wants you to get to their clients regardless of how much it makes sense at all because it personally affects them and how they are evaluated. I always see people saying that accounting is a “good job for autistic people” but frankly I just think it’s terrible, at least if you go into public. You need to communicate almost constantly with a revolving door of managers, reviewers and clients to make sure things don’t fall apart, and there are so many seemingly nonsensical aspects of the job that really only make sense once you start interpreting them through the lens of incentive structures. Yes, I am badly burned out and looking for exit opportunities.
More options
Context Copy link