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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34948 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I had the pleasure last night of watching the 2011 documentary Empire of Dust, a Belgian film that explores interactions between a Chinese construction group and local Congolese in rural Congo. I'm sure many of you have seen it - you've certainly seen this meme - but I wanted to bring it up anyway for discussion, as it was a brilliant piece of film-making and very thought-provoking. The whole thing is available free here on Youtube.

The main theme of the documentary is probably cultural differences between Chinese and Congolese workers. The Chinese complain about how the Congolese are lazy, dishonest, and disorganised and are only interested in beer, dancing, and football. We see lots of glimpses of this, with many scenes of Congolese workers just standing around doing nothing, and seriously dysfunctional industry and construction.

On the other hand, the Chinese foreman, Lao Yang, often comes across as grumpy, abrupt, and occasionally inhumane. He rarely smiles, doesn't engage in any playful or friendly conversation that we see, berates locals for their ignorance, and argues with local Congolese about price constantly. His Congolese translator actually addresses this, saying "he may seem like he's grumpy about something, but that's just how he is all the time." The Congolese by contrast seem generally relaxed, amiable, and friendly (though admittedly difficult to work with).

Lao Yang is at his most engaging and humane, it seemed to me, when he was marveling at the old Belgian infrastructure and talking about how devastating it was to see it completely neglected - "Do you have any idea how hard it must have been to build that railway?" On the one hand, he's still scolding his Congolese contact Eddy, but he comes across as a genuine engineer, sad to see great works in decline.

Also striking to me were the physical differences; despite the poverty and (one assumes) malnutrition, the Congolese men were mostly tall and muscular and generally physically impressive, whereas most of the Chinese we see looked comparatively weedy. Again, Lao Yang addresses this, saying something to the effect that "this is a harsh land where only the strongest survive, which is why everyone here is so well built".

I don't have any grand culture wars lessons here, other than the obvious one that culture matters - China and Congo are very different societies, and what works in one may not work in another. It also made me somewhat more pessimistic about West Africa's potential for economic development, though perversely, made me more positively disposed towards its culture. The movie also has some odd coverage of colonialism; there's no real criticism of the Belgians demonstrated (when discussing the Congolese motivations for seeking independence in 1960, Eddy says simply "we wanted to rule ourselves"), and a general sense of missed opportunities at failing to preserve the infrastructure and development left by the Belgians.

In any case, it's a wonderful film, and now I'm on a documentary kick, I'd love to get some more recommendations. Most of the documentaries on Amazon seem to either be fairly introductory science that I already know (e.g., Cosmos stuff) or else have a focus on individual personalities - true crime, famous sportsmen, outrageous personalities, etc.. I enjoy a good tale of real survival, but in general, I'm more interested in films that help expand my knowledge of the world, especially stuff like geopolitics, history, or culture. Would love to hear some suggestions!

On the other hand, the Chinese foreman, Lao Yang, often comes across as grumpy, abrupt, and occasionally inhumane.

He does -- but I must say, despite sharing no cultural background with him at all, he was probably the most relatable character I have ever seen in any instance of linear video. Anyone who has ever been responsible for a project made impossible by uncooperative or incompetent collaborators (i.e. anyone who has ever worked for a big company above the entry level for any length of time) will see in this man a spiritual brother. Of course he's grumpy. It would require an exotic mind to be anything but grumpy in the circumstances.

I second your recommendation wholeheartedly. It should be required viewing for anyone who makes economic projections based on a country's population and resources without regard to the finer points of human capital.

I love good documentaries and wish I could find better recommendations, but I am inherently suspicious of how rigorous the fact-checking process is for the average documentary. I stopped watching documentaries because I just don't trust them at baseline, and I don't really have the time/energy to waste on ones that don't meet the threshold. I've been complaining about this since at least 2019:

An example of a documentary I hated was "Whose Streets?" (2017) even though I'm an avid black lives matter supporter. The documentary had a string of random people being interviewed and making all these wild assertions in their living room with no indication whatsoever that any of it was verified or fact-checked. It was so fucking frustrating to watch I gave up after only a few minutes. Of course, it fucking has 98% on RT.

So question for you Mr. Dog but also to everyone, what heuristics do you use to find compelling documentaries that retain factual grounding?

Right, the boom in and trendiness of dramatized true crime, which blends fiction and fashion with the facts, makes one more suspicious than ever. Netflix in particular seems to be running away with this genre.

Yeah - documentaries are almost always intentionally designed for casual fun-watchers, as opposed to 'professional history book / journal article readers who will look for and criticize flaws', so they're rarely careful, and either make no novel claims or make wrong novel claims.

Ooh, good question! As a first pass, I enjoy documentaries that are more anthropological (or “Herodotean”) in style — letting people speak for themselves without necessarily endorsing their message or pushing a heavy-handed agenda. I find Adam Curtis’s stuff quite frustrating for this reason, because it’s so clearly trying to push a narrative with clever editing and commentary (a good parody here of his style). I enjoyed Empire of Dust because it wasn’t clear to me exactly what the message was; or rather, it was up to the viewer to define it. Obviously there’s still an inevitable editorial slant via editing etc. but it wasn’t obvious what it was. I also enjoyed (or was impressed by) The Act of Killing for this reason. In that case the message was maybe clearer, but it was still conveyed largely by letting people damnify themselves in their own words.

That parody is absolutely brilliant. Did you mean to link to that particular timestamp?

Oh no, whoops! Will fix it now.

Why did a movie about the Congo affect your opinion of west Africa?

I should have said “West Central Africa”. But really what I mean is something like it “affected my opinion of that part of Africa, with decreasing confidence as one moves further from the Congo.”

Embarrassed to say I thought it counted as West, too, on account of all the coast. Nope, Central Africa is apparently a separate region. I suppose this is like calling France part of Southern Europe?

Wait until you see how they carve up Canada, especially Ontario. The center of the country is in Western Canada, not Central Canada. Northern Ontario is well west of Western Ontario, and (at least going by the physical map rather than, say, one that showed population density) is not particularly far north. It's confusing even for us, sometimes.

Or just plain USA. “Midwest” is a very confusing definition for foreigners

I suppose this is like calling France part of Southern Europe?

Now you're confusing me, surely France straddles both Northern and Southern Europe, while also being firmly within Western Europe?

Wikipedia says no, TIL, the Pyrenees and the Alps mark the borders of Southern Europe, being on the Mediterranean coast isn't enough.

Knowing a bunch of Frenchmen from the south coast, I'd call wikipedia's definition bullshit lol. They're a very distinct race from northerners in looks and habits.

The Romans had it right. Anyone south of the Loire you lump in with the Italians and Spanish, and anyone north of it is a Frank.

Once you take the wide view on culture, you can start to see that stereotypical behaviors of cultures are the result of the pressures of that society. Congolese, Italians and Mexicans are not "lazy", they are optimized for their local culture, which does not reward work nor punish the lack of it. How this interfaces with global sort-of-capitalist economics is uneven at best.

Black culture in the US is likewise poorly suited to producing steady blue collar workers, but really good at producing various entertainers (at lottery-level rates), and extremely vibrant in cultural production/innovation. Black americans have better mental health and general happiness than many other groups, so the question of culture is also a question of what we value.

This is cultural relativism to a point. Cultures are not good nor bad, but they are good/bad for specific things. Jewish/north european/east-asian culture generally produces people well suited to modern mechanized capitalism, so they do well in modern mechanized capitalistic societies. Native american, Hmong, Somali etc. cultures by and large do not. Much of what gets called "structural racism" is in fact merely cultural mismatch to the political and economic realities of the world.

Every culture must follow their own path in responding to modernism/globalism, but some paths lead to better places than others.

One can admire the Chinese/Japanese work ethic, but I'd rather live as an Italian.

Black americans have better mental health and general happiness than many other groups, so the question of culture is also a question of what we value.

In theory.

In practice this question is more and more devolved to the market in the West, so not all cultures are equal.

Given the clear material issues with the black population (e.g. disproportionately high crime and poverty) they're not really a model, in practice. Yes, cultures are good and bad at specific things, but some cultures are good or bad enough at enough of the things we care about that they're seen as exemplars or models as a whole.

There's a lot of slack for personal preference if you consider the GDP per capita of Japan vs. Italy. However, there'll be much less divergence of opinion if it was Japan vs. Congo.

This is the root of American racial dysfunction: there are many cultures that could be said to be a success as a whole in American terms (again: in the market), but black Americans aren't one of them. I don't think any of the "well-off" ethnic groups would trade their place in America's class hierarchy for that of the blacks. Good music and dance is nice and all but it doesn't seem to translate to a lot of the goods we care about. As you say: a tiny percentage of people win that lottery.

I certainly don't mean to imply that all cultures are "equal" in some cosmic sense. Some are just light-years ahead in terms of what outcomes they produce. A very small subset of cultures give us the modern world, the first and only time in human history in which the vast majority of people were not poverty-stricken peasants on the edge of starvation, disease and predation.

I do mean to say directly that even pretty bad cultures are usually that way for a reason, and have their good points that make people want to continue them.

Some cultures just need to die, as they outlive their usefulness. Every time I see someone trying to resurrect some dead language or culture, it's a ridiculous spectacle. Let Welsh go. We don't need it, the Welsh don't need it, words don't all need twelve "l"s in them, there's no point to it. We can all chuckle about it when it's white european native culture being supplanted and driven out of existence by more competitive options, but everyone gets squeamish when it's non-europeans.

There are no hunter-gatherer cultures that can be useful enough to reproduce in the modern day. There's few if any agricultural ones, and the industrial ones are on the block next.

We do, in fact, still need agriculture and industrial production, unlike Hunter-gathering.

Now if you mean traditional subsistence agriculture, yes, that exists for the museum value at best. But the vast majority of the world’s agricultural production is very much needed.

Agricultural production, yes. A culture of agriculture, not at the societal level. Farmers will probably always have a certain amount of professional distinctiveness, but their existence does not really form the backbone of the national culture. They are an incredibly small group in a modern society.

We also maintain certain hunter/gatherer subcultures (from urban foragers to the large number of actual hunters), but they too are more culturally similar to hobbies than they are to societies.

Agriculture pretty much has to take place in certain areas(flat, rural places with good soil and ready access to water), so the idea that farmers will one day not dominate a society of their own- the very nature of agriculture means it doesn’t play very well with other industries nearby- seems simply dumb.

I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. Especially every time a top-level gets made about Jewish representation.

How much of culture do you think is constrained by relative tech level? If modern venture capitalists were given unfettered access to 18th-century English cottage-industry peasants, I suspect they’d see a similar response. Maybe the previous years of an English state were enough to condition efficient workers...but my guess would be not.

For obvious reasons, I can’t remember seeing any scholarship on the topic.

I don't know if "constrained" is the right word.

I think some cultures are inherently better at adapting to new technology. Others are almost incapable of it, with a bell curve inbetween.

Think Japan versus India versus Australian aborigines.

I guess I’m trying to disentangle culture (meaning interpersonal relations, obligations, division of labor) from culture (meaning societal organization).

I have a suspicion that the average English peasant had similar interpersonal relationships as the average Congolese. English adaptation to tech would then be driven more by a culture that let it cajole them into useful labor anyway. That probably means state capacity, but also norms about rent extraction and the available alternatives to industrial work.

Dump a Chinese railroad company into pastoral 1790 England, and I’d expect them to come up with all the same criticisms from the documentary—unless they took on more statelike powers.

It’s a nice story, partly because it avoids the standard /pol/ conclusion exhibited on that KnowYourMeme page. But I don’t really know much about how England supplied labor in early industrialization. I’ll do a bit more research and probably make a top-level later.

What was the reaction to 18th century English poor going to the mills?

I don’t think it was...great.

Obviously it worked out for England, as the state parlayed that technological advantage into a ludicrous economic one. Did the peasants get “pulled” into vast economic opportunity, or “pushed” out of a non competitive textile market? Whig history prefers the latter explanation. It’s really not my area of expertise.

Coincidentally I have just recently listened to the latest episode of The Redline podcast related to cobalt mining in Congo. It is an episode within wider miniseries regarding green topics, but it can very well be considered as a standalone episode. I really highly recommend the podcast in general to anyone who wants to keep tabs on what is going on around the world. It has a unique format of interviewing 3-4 experts on any given topic (e.g. civil war in Jemen or what are Private Military Companies about in today's world).

There is fair share of geopolitics of Congo in that podcast episode. Sadly one thing that stuck with me is how bad the situation is there with various warlords. There are apparently over 100 different armed groups in this vast country of 92 million people - a country larger than Mexico. And apparently all these armed groups created a new equilibrium where they basically depend on constant conflict to make money. Additionaly, attention paid to green minerals of the future from developed markets have potential to push Congo even more into some kind of "green minerals" version of petrostate, where the government gets all the profit from resource extraction which gives them no incentive to create healthy economy and tax base to draw power from. I see very bleak future for the country given that it would be extremely challenging to overcome myriads of other obstacles even under the best of circumstances. Listen to it if you want to know more.

Congo has more land mass than France, Spain, Italy and Germany put together. This proclamation of yours would be as if you said that you were to Paris and prefer it to Madrid which somehow impacts on how Germans live.

Would love to hear some suggestions!

If one is interested in Chinese bossing around other races, American Factory (2019). But if it is Africans one is after, Africa Addio (1966) provides rare depictions of genocides and atrocities forgotten.

I hated American Factory. They could have made a decent documentary, but instead made a profoundly stupid circlejerk.

This town is completely devastated because of the loss of manufacturing jobs. Factory starts up and offers decent pay, but not as good as before when labour was worth a premium because it was scarce. People still have financial trouble because of debt/medical issues. Somehow this is the factory's fault. Very unironic Cophenhagen ethics. We'll mention that the factory cost billions of dollars that have yet to be paid off and is operating at a loss every month once and somehow never actually internalize what that means. They are just greedy businessmen that aren't paying the workers what they are worth.

They intersperse interviews with mainland China workers that have conditions 10x worse than the American ones, but have zero empathy for their plight. Chinese guy talks about how he has worked 996 and never seen his family for 5 years. American guy complaining that he only gets $25 an hour. American guy talking about how they only get an 8 minute break every hour out of some really hot place in a factory, cut to Chinese guy saying they have 12 hour shifts in the hot area where they aren't allowed to leave at all.

They start getting into the union organizing/busting bit. They paid these consultants $200k to come in and do some union busting. It would have cost less to give everyone that worked there $.50 more an hour for a single month. No, I don't understand the difference between a one-time cost and increasing a recurring cost like labour. I will repeat this same argument ten times throughout the movie because I clearly think it is a slamdunk.

They actually give everyone modest pay raises and other concessions that people were pushing for ahead of the union vote. This clearly means they are evil because what the workers truly need is not better conditions and pay, but a union.

It is really awful because you could have taken what they had and made a good movie, but instead made something that only appeals to someone that already agrees with all of their positions. Hell, I'm on board with 90% of what they want and hated it still.

American Factory was seriously depressing as an American. You’re confronted with the fact that our ill health spells ruin for our future. These American workers simply can’t do what the Chinese can do in terms of productivity, they have been made fat and slow from the American diet poisoning them over decades.

I'm not especially convinced that there's that much of a shortage of Americans who want to work dogmatically hard.

I'm just not sure American culture filters those people to glass factories in Dayton, OH.

In America those people tend to get filtered into industries like Tech, Finance, Medicine, Law, Entertainment, Sports.

Comparative advantage being what it is, glass manufacturing appears to be something to aspire to a bit more in China than it is in America, shrug, so it goes.

Within a couple days of watching American Factory I watched a short 20 or so minute documentary about various supply chains in China, after failing to find it in half hour or so of internet searching I've given up, but most of the factories were of cheap plastic trinkets, the pace of work seemed pretty comparable to the Americans in Dayton.

Even in China, I imagine there are hierarchies of where people are motivated to work, and which places attract the motivated workers, they're just different than they are here.

I wish it didn’t have cringe parts like white South African kids jumping on a tramboline for five minutes with commentary one level below third reich propaganda movies. Its recordings of how decolonisation happened on the ground is just incredible. Totally unmatched. Also the recordings of the genocide are the most harrowing moments I have ever seen on film. For the uninitiated, they fly over a couple thousand disposed Arabs running for their lives one day and when they return with their helicopter the next time, it’s just corpses. A lot of corpses.

That said, I'd be hesitant to make grand assumptions about all sub-Saharan Africans, as many on the right do, based on this film. I work with African 'elites' on a regular, sometimes daily basis

Perhaps needless to say, this kind of exposure to a sample selected in such extreme fashion is likely to give rise to its own set of misapprehensions.

Notably, those 'elites' are with you in a conference room in London; they left their home for a reason. Assumptions about a country's domestic potential should be informed by that observation.

That's just one more consequence of modern technology, though. A hundred years ago, local elites were.. A thing. Today, elite culture is much more standardised globally, and the best among the poor have no reason to improve the lot of their fellows: they can shack up with the wealthy instead.

I work with African 'elites' on a regular, sometimes daily basis, and many remind me more of Lao than they do the laborers.

TBH: this can be its own problem sometimes, because I fear that the lurking classism of the African elites (which makes them identify more with Westerners and often look down on their own - or maybe it's the other way round) poses a problem to them effectively acting in their own country.

I work with African 'elites' on a regular, sometimes daily basis, and many remind me more of Lao than they do the laborers.

Yeah, this resonates with me; I had some excellent West African study abroad students while teaching in the US, for example, who were consummate professionals and very serious (not uncommon for them to wear suits and ties to class!). More broadly, thanks to signaling and countersignaling I think you get a lot of cleavage between the culture and norms of a nation's elites and the behaviour of its mainstream culture, to the point where there are even inverse correlations (example: in my experience American international elites tend to be slimmer and fitter than their British or Irish equivalents, despite - or rather because of - the greater prevalence of obesity among working class Americans). All that said, you can't run a country with elites alone, so the culture of the general populace matters, and it's hard for me to watch EoD without feeling at least some pessimism about Congo's near-term development.

Consider then the Congolese day laborer, who makes no such assumptions. He lives in the jungle, where it is sometimes dangerous but usually warm and comfortable. Cold beer and decent food are solid pleasures.

This reminds me of the 'bee sting effect' as used by economists to understand the behaviour of people living in poverty. Imagine you have two people, A and B, and both have bee stings. Person A has 2 bee stings, and Person B has 6, and you can get each sting treated for $20 a pop. The idea is that Person A perversely is more likely to seek treatment, because there's a realistic pathway to being "bee sting free", whereas Person B might just drown their sorrows in booze or similar. A related phenomenon is why you're much more likely to get a dent fixed on your car if you only have one than if you have ten. With this in mind, you might think that your average Congolese day labourer has an extremely limited and precarious set of pathways to serious economic empowerment, whereas Lao has lots, and that this explains the difference in their behaviour, which as you say, might not be irrational.

There is a film, American Factory, about a Chinese factory attempt in Ohio.

I think I'll be watching this one tonight.

But this seems to discount marginal utility. Presumably an additional dollar to the poor is worth more than an additional dollar to the already well off?

Talking to some poor people from Romani community, this is not always the case. Poor families often organize themselves around clans. If one of them "makes it" there is implicit expectation of support for wider family/clan supposedly in exchange for higher status but also higher pressure and responsibility. Shit is complicated.

"Theodore Dalrymple" described the same pressures on black people in pre-Zimbabwe Rhodesia:

... salaries in Rhodesia were equal for blacks and whites doing the same job, so that a black junior doctor received the same salary as mine. But there remained a vast gulf in our standards of living, the significance of which at first escaped me; but it was crucial in explaining the disasters that befell the newly independent countries that enjoyed what Byron called, and eagerly anticipated as, the first dance of freedom.

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire—and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes.

and the same effects are at play in modern Senegal:

All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians. If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he’d go to another country. The reason? Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for free, and you would have to say yes. End of your business. You are not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives. The result: Everyone has nothing.

And (though I don't have a source for this one) I've heard the same problem reported in multiple underclasses of the USA. If you have a sudden windfall and you save or invest it responsibly, then from that point until the point when you're broke again, any time a friend or family member asks if you can spare some cash, you have to choose between lying to them, telling the truth but then being seen as a heartless monster who won't share with them, or sharing and getting your savings drained away by them. In that context, blowing all your cash on a fancy new pickup truck (or whatever other splurge is appropriate to your particular subculture) isn't just foolish overconsumption, it's the closest you can get to actually saving money, by putting it into something that your community won't ask you to sell so you have money in your pocket to give them but that you could theoretically sell (albeit at a loss) if you needed money for a true emergency.

So anyway, it's not just a Romani problem (though you're not the first person I've read who reported it there). It seems to be almost a human universal that if you tell someone "he's not giving his money to friends and family" they see that as a moral failing, if you tell someone "he's not working harder to earn money for friends and family" they don't see that as an equivalent moral failing, and if you tell someone "those two attitudes combine to form an incentive mechanism that condemns whole cultures to poverty" ... well, it's better to try to explain differential equations to some people than game theory; they may not get it either way, but at least nobody looks at a Laplace transform and concludes that the mathematician explaining it must be evil.

For the very poor (especially, say, subsistence-farming peasants for whom a bad harvest may literally mean death) social capital is often significantly more valuable than actual capital (especially money). In a pre-industrial society there's nothing to invest in, and even nowadays you probably don't know how to invest because that kind of financial literacy isn't something people in your community have (which is why you get a lot of borderline or actual scams aimed at financially illiterate poor people). Being well-liked by your neighbors and being known as someone who will help out in a pinch earns you a degree of reciprocity.

It's not a cultural practice that is optimized for success in a post-industrial economy, but it works well enough and 2000 years ago worked better for most people than trying to save some cash so that the taxman or some bandits could take it instead.

All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians. If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he’d go to another country.

Huh, you know...I saw this growing up and I never actually considered that the reason was that locals didn't want to own a store in their home town. Because some locals did.

My main assumption was simply that the Arabs supported one another: it seemed like they'd fund someone to come over with access to stock, they sold out and went home and were replaced by someone else.

Indians also have their hooks in a lot of these countries and, imo, it just beggars belief that no local wanted to open those businesses because they'd have family members begging for TVs. I assume a similar mechanism: Indians have links to buy these consumer goods that are manufactured or made back home or even in other countries.

That’s possibly an explanation for why Cajuns and East Indians do so much better for themselves outside of Acadianna/India, although selection effects also loom large.

That’s also why rural, working class men in the US own so many guns- they’re easy to turn into $500 for a true emergency at the pawn shop, but quite difficult to turn into $100 for your cousin in a very survivable tough spot. Spending your larger-than-expected bonus on buying a nice AR-15 is a reasonable response to living in conditions of being the largest earner in your immediate social circle.

"he's not working harder to earn money for friends and family" they don't see that as an equivalent moral failing

Isn't child support calculated based on the earning potential of the father? And he has to pay that amount, even if he is unemployed. So such logic isn't completely absent today, just quite rare.

Hmm... you're entirely right. I'd even say it's not rare, when you consider how it extends beyond child support. Alimony counts too, and so does working hard even when not divorced! Maybe the distinction is between "nuclear family" and "extended family"? A man who doesn't work harder when his wife and kids are in need is considered shameful, but is there any culture that shames a cousin for not putting in longer hours when his cousin is in need? I'd be surprised. First of all, there's a "why doesn't the recipient just work harder instead" question that applies to a friend or cousin more than to a child; second, it (perhaps uncharitably...) seems to me that the "you need to share what you have with the whole wide community" ethos has a lot of overlap with the "you don't get to have more by working harder, that's just a lie the Man uses to squeeze more profit out of you" ethos...

Yeah, I've seen this too, growing up.

Including the resentment shown in @Iconochasm's DMX lyric: because the system is implicit and not really systematized, it seems to work well generally but struggles when someone is atypically successful.

Because usually you only get demands from your own family or "clan" and they'll be relatively reasonable things; things poor people could help each other with. However, if you are prominent, larger groups of people (who have a much weaker claim but you nonetheless can't tell to go fuck themselves, not that sort of society) start making even more demanding appeals. You don't have to give it to them, but you do have to listen which causes enough stress on its own.

This comes up a lot in rap music, too.

Ain't never gave nothing to me (Yeah)

But every time I turn around

Cats got they hands out wantin' somethin' from me (Uh, huh)

I ain't got it, so you can't get it (Yeah)

Let's leave it at that 'cause I ain't with it (Yeah)

Luo can expect to invest his money to get his kids into a fancy Western university or to drive up Canadian housing prices. The Congolese do not live somewhere the market lets them buy that much with their money, nor somewhere so safe that such wealth is secure at all.

Perhaps. On the other hand, we see similar behaviors in first world countries where the poor continue to behave in sun optimal ways despite having the same ability as Luo. Maybe there is a different explanation for this poor group.

I saw this documentary in cinemas when it came out, and found it far more moving than I expected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_(film)

Group therapy sessions in Folsom prison.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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