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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   17502 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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All points taken.

FWIW what I’m basing my ‘Chinese’ reports on is:

a) various conversations with (mostly older) people in train stations etc. Maybe I am the victim of a sophisticated propaganda barrage designed to subvert visiting foreigners but if it can successfully hire/imitate retired professors of geology then it’s a very good program. I didn’t speak to younger people.

b) My Chinese co-workers in Japan. One of whom is a very good friend and left China to escape his overbearing extended family not Xi. He is mildly pro-China rather than anti-China or pro-America, but not to any silly extent.

This seems like a huge strawman to me. Americans aren't capable of ciriticizing themselves? Really?

Of course Americans are capable of criticising themselves. But in the main they seem to criticise themselves for not being American enough. For failing to live up to the American ideal, undermining American freedoms/rights, too much or too little immigration according to taste. Very few people apart from the largely-defunct pro-European movement are saying that maybe the American way of doing things is at best one system among many. Or for example things like, “maybe balance-of-power democracy and a system of rights defended by law is less effective than a single party run by engineers and a tightly controlled industrial policy” or “maybe basing our national mythology on having a revolution to avoid paying taxes and submitting to central authority encourages fractiousness and sectarianism”.

EDIT:

150+ years of mass immigration before American total hegemonic power suggests that people wanted to be Americans long before America was the all powerful hegemon it is now

You do have to bear in mind who these people were, though. Overwhelmingly Irish, Italian, German and Jewish, with some Chinese. All people who had pretty good reasons (poverty or persecution or not wanting to live with the Prussians) for leaving their current country. I am sure they liked the idea of freedom but I think that the push factors were more pressing. And indeed Britain also got many of these people.

All points taken.

FWIW what I’m basing my ‘Chinese’ reports on is:

a) various conversations with (mostly older) people in train stations etc. Maybe I am the victim of a sophisticated propaganda barrage designed to subvert visiting foreigners but if it can successfully hire/imitate retired professors of geology then it’s a very good program. I didn’t speak to younger people.

b) My Chinese co-workers in Japan. One of whom is a very good friend and left China to escape his overbearing extended family not Xi. He is mildly pro-China rather than anti-China or pro-America, but not to any silly extent.

I would say a professor is exactly the kind of person who is usually vehemently pro CCP. Reliant on the state, succesful, obliged by his profession to be pro-communist, and so on. Using him as an example of Chinese opinion is kind of like saying "Well most Americans love leftist ideology, I talked to an HR manager from Microsoft and she said it's beloved by all her coworkers."

Now, maybe I went too far because there are still plenty of strains of people who love the CCP, but I do think, especially compared to ten to fiteen years ago there is a gloom about the future of China among the Chinese. Not only is the economy puttering along haphazardly, but people, especially educated people who don't have a stake in pretending the CCP is great, are aware that Xi broke the chain of succession and limited separations of powers the CCP had built for itself post Mao and that is deeply related to the problems China is facing at the moment.

Of course Americans are capable of criticising themselves. But in the main they seem to criticise themselves for not being American enough. For failing to live up to the American ideal, undermining American freedoms/rights, too much or too little immigration according to taste. Very few people apart from the largely-defunct pro-European movement are saying that maybe the American way of doing things is at best one system among many. Or for example things like, “maybe balance-of-power democracy and a system of rights defended by law is less effective than a single party run by engineers and a tightly controlled industrial policy” or “maybe basing our national mythology on having a revolution to avoid paying taxes and submitting to central authority encourages fractiousness and sectarianism”.

I mean, that's not really true as evidenced by Catholic integralist Fuentes's rise, (the know nothings were right and letting all the Catholics in was a mistake). However, I just don't think any well reasoned person who has spent time in China can honestly say that a separation of power individual right defending republic is less worth living in or succesful than a single party totalitarian communist state. If you want to say living in Germany is better than living in America, I might snigger at you a little behind your back, but I'll hear you out. But the country with a 13k GDP per capita running a genocide in its far reaches with a straight line of succession back to the most disastrous dictator in human history? I mean...I'm trying to be nice here...but it's hard... It's one thing to say "America should have more industrial policy." (which is a discussion being had) and completely another to say "The American republic is worse in most or many ways than the CCP."

You do have to bear in mind who these people were, though. Overwhelmingly Irish, Italian, German and Jewish, with some Chinese. All people who had pretty good reasons (poverty or persecution or not wanting to live with the Prussians) for leaving their current country. I am sure they liked the idea of freedom but I think that the push factors were more pressing. And indeed Britain also got many of these people.

The largest ethnic makeup of America is by far German and British (including Scottish and English as one for simpliticty's sake), with Mexicans a recent distant third. Neither of these places were exactly the bottom of the barrel of the world at the time. America was just better. I also think fleeing persecution (EDIT: I should say restrictiveness instead of persecution (in a broad sense, not necessarily genocidal or even violent)) was and to a large extent still is a gravity pulling a lot of the world towards America. That's kind of what the sales pitch of joining a free country entails--freedom.

Take your point re: different Chinese groups. Going to have to wait and see how that shakes out.

For the rest, I think it would help to make my perspective more clear. I am British as I said, and we’re in a mess, so the question of which role models we should look at is a salient one. America is clearly more prosperous than China now, but the direction of travel seems to be in a quite negative direction (I am not talking about GDP) whereas China seems broadly positive and improving except for the very serious issue of demographics.

The genocide against the Ugyurs is awful, but looks rather different when in the UK we have mass stabbings by Arabs on a monthly basis and polls find ~25% of the Muslim population is softly supportive of jihad. Just yesterday we welcomed a man to the UK who has called for the slaughter of all Zionists, and policemen, and says explicitly that he despises all whites. I would not like us to go as far as the Chinese but an explicit goal of ‘no Islamic culture in the UK’ pursued with vigour and the invasive surveillance of the CCP would be far better than what we have.

That is, I am not saying that the American republic is clearly worse right now than the CCP. I am saying that I am not sure it is a good role model, and I am not sure how much it was being propped up by historical contingency. It may be that there are no good role models, and that we all take our turn in the great carousel of history, but I am not yet quite so black pilled.

The largest ethnic makeup of America is by far German and British (including Scottish and English as one for simpliticty's sake), with Mexicans a recent distant third. Neither of these places were exactly the bottom of the barrel of the world at the time. America was just better.

I think that this is the wrong time period to look at. Yes, when America still had lots of empty space and a weak central culture, lots of people being restricted chose to go there and make a society for themselves. That time is over. America is settled, it has a central government with wide-ranging powers and a fairly strong culture both formal and informal. Now the question is not, “should we leave to the New World and start afresh?” it’s “should we go to America and become Americans?”. That is why I limited my analysis to Ellis Islanders and later.

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