This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Real shit has already started. I find the notion that this is the local peak and we'll have some respite unreasonably optimistic. There is, in principle, no reason for the war to not escalate into seven-figure casualties range, global economic issues not to deepen into a new Great Depression (related, h/t @sciuru), the war over Taiwan and subsequent Chinese and Russian collapses not to begin in, like, Q2 2023, then we get first serious AI incidents and global censorship/compute regulation regime, nuclear exchange by 2024, famines by 2025, supervirus plague (many variants currently in development) and what have you – up to and including NGO/Messiah/Basilisk coming. Garbage time is running out, like Nick Land warned us but we didn't listen. «Nothing ever happens» is sooo 2015.
Now as for your analysis, China has its own set of insurmountable structural problems, self-inflicted but at the same time exploited by the US: food dependence (yes, they won't starve outright the moment Malacca is blockaded, but no, they are actually not food-secure, they need to import that livestock feed, fertilizers and everything else and will not be able to pivot to rationing in emergency), chip/tech dependence that'll very painfully restrict their long-term ability to attack Taiwan with its accelerating militarization, collapsing real estate bubble, terrible ecology and soil health, brain drain, spiking dependency ratio plus failing soon at the automation cope (because, again, no chips), being boxed in by American allies, and plain degenerating governance that has unironically fallen in some respects to the lows of Mao era (and none of those problems will be solved by the planned assault on Taiwan). Iran suffers from similar woes (oh look) – and so does every other anti-America country.
There really is no trade-off between helping Ukraine crush Russian imperial ambitions and choking China (or defending Taiwan, or encouraging a revolution in Tehran), and expanding influence in the EU; those efforts load, and load only modestly, completely different non-interchangeable sectors of American economy and state capacity, and accordingly there is no advantage to China from Russia getting into this mess in the form of American weakening. Other modes are also dubious. Resource colony? No, there's no significant advantage here aside from the ability to demand discounts; Russia is already near-maximally dependent on China, and is unable to deliver as much as they need and more than is already delivered. We still don't have a reliable transport route, the «silk road» goes through Kazakhstan which is rapidly losing respect for Russia and drifting out of its sphere of influence; pipelines are fragile, as we've learned recently; construction of new connections has been criminally slow etc. In non-essential trade like fish and other foodstuff, China has been sabotaging trade on the pretext of COVID. Of course Russia has primed the world for blanket sanctions against aggressors. Plus a lot of previous gen Chinese military technology is derived from Russian/Soviet models, so now the free world is getting free training in destroying it. In general, getting your ally diminished is not any sort of 4D strategy (though I would't put it past them to grossly miscalculate). The list of demerits goes on.
But none of this matters in the grand scheme of things. What matters is that Russia and China are in terminal decline because they cannot retain talented people, and the point of no return has been passed some substantial time ago. I am always appalled by economic/political analysis which ignores this and focuses on some nonsense like GDP growth or even trade surplus. Who cares? If you don't have talent you cannot compete; worse yet, you have to allow talentless people to climb hierarchies of competence and power (if only to maintain short-term order and production pace), and they reinforce the culture of underhanded competition that closes off the hierarchy to remaining talent, which accelerates its flight or just rots on the bottom of the society; in the end you have a police state with serfs, and that's less than nothing in our era. Both countries are like men with fatal illness (or gradual blood loss); at times they grasp for panaceas, at times they feel mad rage, and at times they feel better and get complacent, but it already does not matter because the bottom line has been written long ago.
An appropriate Galkovsky quote from 1989:
True to form, he wrote «Jews» and «Anti-Semitism» instead of «Americans» etc. in the original. But this replacement probably only makes things better, and does not change the point.
This is bullshit. Whoever wrote this does not know France at all. Sure, we are closer to America now. Sure, we look less like 18th century France. But does America look like 18th century America? This argument is shitty. Modern France does not look like 18th century France because we have cars, planes, trains and computers. Nothing to do with America by itself.
The relationship to the economy and to the culture is not at all the same in France and in the US. It's not that French people oppose freedom to own weapons, it's that they do not even understand why anyone would not oppose it.
Currently, there is a strike in refineries that would have created an oil shortage if the government did not react by using strategical reserves. Can you imagine that in the US?
There is a national ban of headscarves (or actually any kind of religious or political symbols) at public schools in France. Can you imagine that in the US?
In the last presidential election, we got an actual socialist at 22% (the guy is anti NATO and thinks Taiwan should belong to the US). Macron got 28% and Le Pen 23%. Can you imagine that in the US?
Healthcare and retirement schemes are state-controlled. Can you imagine that in the US?
The only one of your four things hard to imagine in the US is the national ban on religious symbols at public schools. Healthcare and retirement are already heavily state controlled. Strikes happen in the US too, though far less often than in France. And while our system tends to whittle presidential elections down to two serious candidates, we did have Bernie Sanders (an actual socialist) in the primaries in 2016.
Bernie Sanders politics would be center right in France. There is a french guy I know that was supporting Bernie Sanders in the US and François Fillon (the mainstream right wing candidate in 2017) in France...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To be clear, he says «the brain is Jewish» etc., I have changed it for Americans to reflect the contemporary cultural hegemony of the US.
Those features you list are, in my opinion, insignificant. France is one of the more unique polities on Earth, Americans may have homeschooling and you are compelled to ingest state indoctrination starting at 3 years of age, but what is learned is essentially the same.
What do you mean essentially the same? Obviously we learn that 2+2=4, do you think it means that it is the same as american culture? I doubt Americans spend as much time on grammar (and especially on french grammar) in the US. The language is not the same. It's not a detail: the book we read in class are not the same, they are from french literature. Do Americans ever read l'Avare, from Molière? Almost every french person has read it. Do most Americans ever hear about Racine and Corneille, about Flaubert and his master work, Madame Bovary? We learn at least two foreign languages, so that I can understand something like 50% of an article written in german, and like 95% of anything written in english (yet foreign language learning is not that good in France when compared to other european countries). Do Americans learn foreign languages? In history lessons, there is much emphasis on the french Revolution, but we almost never speak about the American revolution. Most french people do not even know there was an American revolution. Have Americans ever heard about Danton and Robespierre? About the differences between Jacobins and Girondins? There are also lessons on Napoleon, with much emphasis on his politics. Do Americans learn Napoleon's politics? So please tell me what is "essentially the same".
I've skimmed it in first grade. Soviets, like the pre-revolutionary elite, were fans of posh European literature and my house had a decent stack of that stuff. We could find other parallels, like the appreciation for High Modernism (some of Moscow architecture is in that style) or whatever.
Do you think that the Soviet Union was essentially similar to France on this account, if not others? I believe it was pretty much an alien civilization.
But there's a similarity, of course. It's the obsession with literature and formal school education as the fundamental frame of reference. Probably there are CCP stans too, who believe that learning Confucius is what makes Xi's PRC the heir to the ancient empire.
Not much to say here.
I still dont get to know what is important or not. I'm not sure anyway that the difference between XXth century France and Russia are were bigger than between XVIIIth century and XXIst century USA...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you've kind of missed his point entirely; globalization occurs on distinctly American terms, and while France gets to have its own particulars as to certain things, there are matters of politics that exist within a particularly American frame. Now, since you are presumably French, you might contend this, but I think his point is that US cultural hegemony (propagated through US-based international business power and cultural power centers like Hollywood, Wall Street, etc.) will transform places like France and the UK to resemble America in everything but surface-level appearance (you might be familiar with this concept from a certain Rammstein song that someone linked somewhere in this mega-thread). A point that some posters here might make is that EU countries have thrown away traditional elements of their cultures in order to plug themselves into the international capitalism machine, a system that has strong roots in the US, thus giving power-brokers from within the private and public parts of the US incredible leverage over the internal workings of EU nations.
As a side note, I suspect you didn't learn about the American Revolution because it would have probably made your own revolution look like an absolute clusterfuck, but that is my own American cultural hegemony talking, so.
The problem with those claims is that they are non falsifiable. "Surface level" does not mean anything. I can prove that there is a huge difference and you can still claim it to be on surface level only. Actually your theory is really like marxism "anything non surface level can be explained by the class strugle". I am quite sure Marx would have loved your theory.
France, and a lot of other european countries, resist the american version of capitalism in some ways, and imitate it in other ways. If I say that all modern science is french because it uses the metric system excepted on a surface level, it is a ridiculous claim yet you can hardly disprove it as I did never explain what a surface level is. The french unions, the number of companies where the gouvernement has stocks (eg car companies, the train transportation company SNCF 100% state owned...), and the relationship of the people with the government are examples of things that are very different between french capitalism and american capitalism.
And hiding insults behind loosely related theories won't prove your point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link