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Notes -
Apt reference to the Social Credit idea.
Would you say the same logic applies to Xi?
Yet he has become the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao, and all of the (doomed to be destroyed by the West) Chinese civilization now revolves around his whims.
There's a lesson here somewhere. Probably this one: power wins. Its exercise validates protests, but only up to the point where it can be plausibly resisted; past that, people fall in line and learn to excuse the blatantly inexcusable, or perish.
Power wins, but not all power has the same nature. Xi projects power, and I don't think he wants to leave doubt as to where power in China lies. But if you watch the Lex Fridman interview with Kanye, Fridman refuses to even acknowledge any factual basis or underlying reality to what Kanye describes as the "Jewish media." Fridman doesn't dispute the fact of the matter, he just invokes the Holocaust to assert that it's wrong for Kanye to call Jewish people Jewish.
Overt exercises of power like this are contrary to the strategies that have served them well throughout history. Jews cannot exert a Xi-level of power projection in the West, for a number of reasons. At the same time, they cannot allow anti-semitism to grow in public consciousness. It's a delicate balance, and one that is made much more delicate when you get goofy Gentiles like Kanye West and Whoopie Goldberg who do not understand the game they are playing.
The other option is to neither protest nor fall in line, but to silently join a growing set of noticers who are unhappy with what they perceive as an unfair arrangement. Kipling's poem captures that mode well.
But this entire affair should not be overstated, I don't think it's going to change anything except slightly grow the set of noticers. Noticing is not the same thing as acquiring power, that's very true. But history shows it only takes a surprisingly small portion of a population to accept a taboo before it inevitably becomes mainstream consensus.
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