site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1630 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 16, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So, what are you reading?

Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything has raised expectations, but it remains to be seen if it will fulfill them. So far they have tried to reconsider the Enlightenment in light of discussions missionaries had with the natives of the New World, on the assumption that the records of these discussions are sincere and not just European uses of "Indians" as characters to project their own subversive beliefs.

The topic of indigenous influence on what we call western culture has been on my radar ever since I read Felix Cohen's brilliant 1952 paper Americanizing the White Man. Normally I would consider these kinds of things to be proto-woke nonsense, but Cohen immediately struck me as a man of intelligence, dedication and nerve, so it has stayed with me. He posited that core American traits existed before the settlers ever came:

As yet, few Americans and fewer Europeans realize that America is not just a pale reflection of Europe - that what is distinctive about America is Indian, through and through. American cigarettes, chewing gum, rubber balls, popcorn and corn flakes, flapjacks and maple syrup, still make European eyebrows crawl. American disrespect for the authority of parents, presidents and would-be dictators still shocks our European critics. And visitors from the Old World are still mystified when they find no peasants on American soil. But the expressions of pain, surprise and amused superiority that one finds in European accounts of the habits of the "crazy Americans" are not new. One finds them in European reports of American life that are 200 and even 400 years old. All these things, and many things more important in our life today, were distinctively American when the first European immigrants came to these shores... Something happened to these immigrants. Some, to be sure, remained European, less hungry, perhaps, but equally intolerant and equally submissive to the authority of rulers and regulations. But some of these immigrants became Americans, tolerant and neighborly, as strong and self-reliant men may be, and for the same reason disrespectful of all authority. To such Americans, a chief who forgets that he is a public servant and tries to tell other people what to do has always been an object of ridicule.

Cohen goes on to describe what he sees as native contributions in various domains including democracy, agriculture and sport. I have also found it amusing that he mentions " the golden tan of an Indian skin" given that arguably the most famous trait of Donald Trump is that he is orange.

Fury: Unbound Book 4 by Nicoli Gonnella.

I finally read The Road by Cormac Mcarthy. Great book, and hard to put down, with no chapters or any other breaks at all. I don't know why I mentally associated Cormac Mcarthy with abstruse James-Joyce-style "literary" fiction, but while the book has a large vocabulary and was semi-poetic at times it was not hard to follow. Might check out some of his others.

The Orchard Keeper is much more similar to the near-inaccessible fiction you describe (I tried to get through Ulysses and failed.) It took me a while to get used to McCarthy's style. I'd say The Road is one of his more readable books, though of course it isn't light reading.

I’ve read almost all of McCarthy’s books and I even have his solo album. it’s true that his style becomes more accessible over time but not in a bad way.

I personally think that the sweet spot for him is the border trilogy - set in post-wwii Texas and Mexico. I don’t remember the order but the books are The Crossing, All the Pretty Horses, and Cities of the Plain.

It's the only McCarthy book I've read from start to finish, and I remember sobbing for literally hours when I got to the end. Not sure if I could put myself through it again.

I don't know why I mentally associated Cormac Mcarthy with abstruse James-Joyce-style "literary" fiction

I've heard that this is true of Blood Meridian, but that his style became more accessible the older he got.

Blood Meridian required me to re-read pages at times, but was a singularly trippy experience. At the end I was both confused and oddly disappointed that it had ended. I would warn anyone off reading it, though I've read it twice. I heard once that someone wanted to make a movie of it, and I'd be interested to see how the hell they would try. One of my most memorable reading experiences. And I'd definitely put it in my list of best reads.

I heard once that someone wanted to make a movie of it, and I'd be interested to see how the hell they would try.

James Franco has attempted to adapt at least one of McCarthy's less cinematic works, and my understanding is that the results left a lot to be desired.

"How the hell they would try to make a movie out of this" novels are pretty much the only reason I still read literary fiction. It is an incredible feeling when you realize you are witnessing something that could only be told on paper and no other way.

Today I read The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. I think it makes a very good case in favour of the idea that premodern China was not a stagnant, conservative, pacifistic Confucian state indifferent to warfare as it is usually imagined in popular conceptions, but was actually an exceptionally dynamic place receptive to new technologies and ideas both before and after the Renaissance hit Europe. In fact, even after the development of the musket and the Renaissance-style star fort, East Asia was no paper tiger; it adopted and modified European-style firearms quickly, and managed to maintain its military might against Europe until as late as the seventeenth century.

It's well known that while the Chinese developed gunpowder during the Tang and used it in increasingly creative ways during the Song Dynasty (with Europe having come across it relatively late), Europe was the first to refine it into the classical cannon style. What's less known is that guns in China were actually developing concurrently in a similar fashion to those in Europe, growing longer relative to muzzle bore, until the existential wars that rocked the Ming Dynasty ended around 1449 and the Ming enjoyed a long period of peace - meanwhile, warfare in Europe grew progressively more intense. What seems to have been a decisive early Chinese advantage was quickly eroded, and to a large amount of historians on the topic, this is viewed as the beginning of European hegemony.

In reality it's not nearly that simple. Once the Portuguese introduced their cannons to China in the 1510s, the Chinese learned rather quickly from it. During the first Sino-Portuguese war, Chinese artillery was inferior to that of the Portuguese, but the following year the Portuguese suffered a serious loss to the Chinese, with every account of the war suggesting that Chinese artillery had improved to the point that it was a decisive factor in their victory. As the Portuguese attempted to collect water, they were pinned down for an hour by heavy firepower, and after they made it back to their ships Chinese gunners blasted them so fiercely that Portuguese guns were incapable of answering. This marks the beginning of a rapid military modernisation in East Asia that brought them well into parity with Europeans during 1522 through the early 1700s.

The Chinese seem to have innovated not only in the design of artillery, but they also innovated in many serious aspects of how firearms were used, the most notable being their usage of drilling and coordination. Most historians seem to think that volley fire for firearms was developed twice; the first being in Japan during the 1570s, and the second being in the Netherlands in the 1590s. But Japan was in fact not the progenitor; volley formations have a long history in China, being described in texts as early as 801 (it initially used crossbows). After the introduction of muskets this strategy was applied very quickly - in 1560 there are already military texts that demonstrate the Ming Dynasty were firing arquebuses in volleys; it is likely this was a common strategy before then.

Possibly the East Asian state most affected by the musket, though, was none other than Korea, who developed advanced musket strategies after the Imjin War and ended up with one of the most effective musket armies during the seventeenth century. Their musketeers were exceptionally lethal in battle with extremely high levels of accuracy, and were feared by pretty much everyone participating in the East Asian sphere at the time. Two of the most expansionary European forces in this period took on East Asians on the battlefield - the Dutch against the Ming and the Russians against the Qing and Korea - and they both lost. When the Dutch actually ended up facing off against the Ming loyalists, of an initial army of 240 European soldiers only 80 escaped, with the remainder either hacked to death, drowned, or captured. European military advantage over East Asia was actually a very recent development in history.

While Europeans had big advantages in defensive fortifications and shipbuilding which the East couldn't quite emulate, Qing China in particular had far superior logistics, with the Kangxi Emperor's careful planning being instrumental in defeating the Russians during the 17th century. This advantage allowed the Qing to consolidate their power and establish an unprecedented period of dominance in East Asia during the high Qing period - which ended up being a double-edged sword. Without external threats, the Qing developed a gay and retarded bureaucracy incapable of responding in an effective centralised manner. Britain came back newly industrialised and pretty much wiped out the Chinese armies during the Opium War, and while Japan centralised and threw out their ancien regime (and, as an aside, destroyed a ton of traditional Japanese culture as a side effect of this culture shift, involving the iconoclastic destruction of many feudal castles and historical Buddhist temples), China was still funding armies that had been established in the seventeenth century which had metastasised into powerful interest groups in spite of their effective uselessness. Their shipbuilding and artillery was actually superior to Japan's, but their internal politics were so dysfunctional they were unable to mount a capable response during the Sino-Japanese war. The rotting corpse of the late Qing held on until 1911, and at that point China was a source of global entertainment and derision: an article from the NYT in 1895 claimed "China is an anachronism, and a filthy one on the face of the earth". Well, it certainly didn't remain that way for long. An anachronism today, it is not.

As an aside I'm quite stunned by how ridiculously advanced the Song Dynasty was for its time, to the point that I think it represents one of the most dizzying heights achieved by a premodern civilisation. More people lived in urban centres during the Song period than at any other time until the late eighteenth century, and 10% of the country was urbanised, a metric that Europe would not reach until 1800. Their production of iron around 1100 was equivalent to the output generated by the entire continent of Europe in 1700, using refined techniques that would only occur in Europe centuries later. The Song utilised automation in textile production to an extent that exceeded medieval and even early modern Europe, in fact it wasn't even until the eighteenth century that Europe achieved such devices.

There were significant advances in gunpowder, printing, anatomy, the discovery of tree dating, rain and snow gauges, rotary cutting discs, the knowledge of magnetic declination, thermoremanent magnetisation, magnetism in medicine, relief maps, all kinds of mathematical innovations and discoveries (including effective algebraic notation and the Pascal triangle of binomial coefficients), steam sterilisation, pasteurisation (of wine), artificial induction of pearls in oysters, effective underwater salvage techniques, all kinds of silk processing devices, including reeling machines, multiple-spindle twisting frames, and others, smallpox inoculation, the discovery of urinary steroids, the use of the toothbrush and toothpaste, a method for the precipitation of copper from iron, the chain drive, the understanding of the camera obscura phenomenon, and new types of clock mechanisms.

They may even have been the first people to become anatomically modern, developing the "modern overbite"; for context, throughout most of history people's top and bottom incisors met tooth to tooth instead of overlapping each other, once food started being cut into small pieces this changed. In Europe this shift only started occuring during the eighteenth century when the fork and knife came into common usage, during the Song Dynasty it was already common at least among the upper class.

Anyway, rather interesting book and something I would recommend to anyone interested in a comparative history of warfare.

The topic of indigenous influence on what we call western culture

If I remember the book correctly, Robert Pirsig had the same idea in Lila. Not western culture in general, but he considered US-American culture to be a merger of Native American and European cultures.

I've been reading, and am most of the way through Fifty-Three Days on Starvation Island: The World War II Battle That Saved Marine Corps Aviation. It's decent I guess. I'd say it's kind of two types of book combined into one.

One type, and the type IMO it actually works at, is as a series of short stories about the air battles between the "Cactus Air Force" on Guadalcanal in WWII and the Imperial Japanese forces. This is in the early days of the war, when American forces were mostly few in number, poorly trained, poorly equipped, and going up against the the cream of the crop of experienced Japanese veterans. The forces end up fairly evenly matched overall, and the stories are exciting. The Americans sometimes take a beating and sometimes dish one out, depending on the details of how well equipped they are at the moment, what tactics the Japanese use that particular time, the weather, etc.

The other type is as a coherent overall story with characters that you care about and who have a narrative. I think it fails at that. There's just too many people, coming and going at random times. There's brief individual stories about some of them, but I don't feel like I remember any of them in particular, or understand them or really care about them in particular. Major issues get brought up as a huge problem, then just forgotten about.

Of course, I still respect their sacrifices and all that. I just don't think it works narratively. It does make me understand a bit more why so many more compelling but fictional war movies keep the focus excessively tightly on a small group that suffers relatively few casualties during the story, even if that isn't really that realistic.

Earlier this week I finished The Story of a New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. While I can admire these books on a theoretical level, ultimately I just think they're not for me. The thing that really puts me off them is just how slow they are: that holiday in Ischia went for well over a hundred pages, most of which consisted of "we woke up, went to meet Nino and Bruno at the beach, we talked about this and that, there was sexual tension, then we went home", occasionally jazzed up with Lila throwing a tantrum or a visit from Stefano. Even my girlfriend, who loves those books, did admit that the slow pace had become a problem for her by the fourth book. I don't plan to read books three and four any time soon: I have a hard time caring what happens to any of the characters.

At @TitaniumButterfly's recommendation, I ordered Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, not realising until it had arrived that it's about nine hundred pages long. If I manage to finish it before the new year (which will be an undertaking) it will be the longest book I've read this year by almost three hundred pages. I started reading it on Thursday, and by page 17 it had already made me laugh out loud twice, which is more than e.g. Doxology managed in ~400. I'm liking it so far, but it has the same problem that every book with this narrative structure has: with the constant jumping back and forth between different perspective characters in different temporal and spatial locations, it's hard to stay immersed, as just as you're getting invested in one of the characters' stories, the chapter ends and you're whisked off elsewhere.

I highly recommend Cryptonomicon as well. Ranges from good to amazing depending on your interest in computing and communications.

Prescient in a hilarious way, too.

I read Crytonomicon earlier this year and loved it. A slow start as I wasn’t expecting such a vastly different world to Snowcrash etc.

Even the dense maths behind some of the cryptography kept my attention, somehow!

Just started Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird on Christian contemplation. It's great so far!

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!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats