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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   22226 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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Is wokeness really retreating from nerd culture? The political winds may be shifting in the west, but our cultural institutions are still run by woke activists.

Tomb Raider Catalyst looks "safe horny", the new Star Wars game is apparently another female lead.

Witcher 4 is going all in on feminism vs patriarchy, which was already a central theme in the previous titles and books (conveniently ignored by nostalgic "chuds").

Expedition 33 is touted as an industry rebel and yet, suspiciously, it sold 2 million copies in 2 weeks, was hyped up across games journalism, astroturfed online AND locked in a Hollywood film deal before it even launched.... all the makings of an industry plant, funded by an "indie publisher" with a paltry $120M investment from Netease, by a studio of teams and partners from diverse backgrounds, cultures and perspectives, that "suddenly" went woke with the sequel like the bait and switch Sony catalogues.

Where Winds Meet's character creation gives you "body types" in English, but the Chinese version says male and female.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 was going to be the chud GOTY made by a pro-GG studio lead, yet it pinkwashes its two male leads and crowbarred an ahistorical Malian man into the main campaign.

GTA 6 is already putting the female lead front and centre, while the male lead looks like the sub. His writing and appearance is oriented to the female gaze, he looks like a billboard model unlike the "average looking" male leads of previous titles.

There's been a concerted effort to create a female fandom for all the male oriented IPs to expand their TAM, especially in gaming where the average budgets keep ballooning every year. The rationale is that male gamers (existing fandom) will remain loyal to the IP and get incalculated into feminism. But females need to be interested. So do away with the fratboy culture! Let HR screen the environment, kick out the milquetoast Gen X techbros and onboard woke millennial women. Accommodate all of their favourite social justice causes (BLM, LGBTQ). Fight the male gaze!

But men consistently remain gaming's biggest consumers. Despite the marketing push for the female leads in RPGs like AC Odyssey, Mass Effect and Cyberpunk heavily pushing the female leads into the marketing, the actual buyer demographic heavily prefer the male lead in all the games. Yet, people's tolerance levels keep going up as games get increasingly woke. In other words, some "tepidly woke" themes are ok because even "beloved classics" like Cyberpunk featured LGBT themes. Anti woke influencers and "trusted friends" promise up and down that condescending Malian and ahistorical synagogue in 15th century Bohemia was totally a creative decision, not ideological corruption. In 20 years, they'll be telling us that black Samurai lead in Japan is also perfectly acceptable.

The structural nature of the industry and investors expectations necessitates an indefinitely expanding fanbase. And the so called anti-wokes silently gaslight themselves so studios realised they can just make them happy by grifting away like Daniel Vavra.

In fact, I believe wokeness had its antecedents decades ago. I'm watching Star Trek DS9 right now. And when it's good, which is far from always, it's not good because it's racially diverse. If Sisko was white, it would not make the show any worse. In fact it would probably save you from bad preachy episodes like "Far Beyond The Stars". Set aside the nostalgia and compare it to the "woke" standards of the time, the "woke" creators of yesteryear fully back the "woke" creators of today.

We might be at least 40 years too late to expect a return to form (whatever that is). Maybe we'll simply just live with it like an amputated limb, occasionally recalling the good old times.

PS: Apologies if my post reads like a brain dump, I'm returning to TheMotte after a long hiatus.

If Sisko was white, it would not make the show any worse.

Ummmm, ackshually, this is demonstrably untrue for at least the episode Q-Less. Q was accustomed to pasty ass Starfleet officers like Picard. He was not prepared for fisticuffs with a real one.

Edit:

In 20 years, they'll be telling us that black Samurai lead in Japan is also perfectly acceptable.

Games, like movies, are a combination of creative / cultural and economic objects. Whether something is acceptable is entirely down to individual preference.

I'm a huge fan of intentionally inserting minorities incongruously in historical adjacent works if there's even a fig leaf. Overlord (2018) is not historically accurate - the Nazis did not have a zombie program to the best of my childhood History Channel viewing knowledge. And there weren't black paratroopers at D-Day either. Cultural works, unless specifically designated, are not historical fact. Provided that the actual facts are widely available to anyone who has any interest, is there some deep wound you're inflicting on the now dead white paratroopers by pretending that black people weren't legally discriminated against through WW2?

The only way to determine whether something a game/movie has done is "acceptable" is tracking sales.

Wasn't that the first episode (or at least one of the first)? Also... the first time Q met humanity, he put it on trial for being a violent and savage race. When he met Sisko he got clocked in the face... do you really want to say "only a black man could have done this"?

Q was trolling them; calling them violent and savage would get under their skin the most. He's plainly not against violence, he's against boredom.

Q: You hit me! Picard never hit me.

SISKO: I'm not Picard.

Q: Indeed not. You're much easier to provoke. How fortunate for me.

People always gloss over that follow up.

Eh, Picard was just older. We saw in "Tapestry" that young Picard was the kind of guy who would have totally decked Q.

Yeah, but Q never came back, did he?

I get the impression Siskso bored him. He never stopped by to pester because there wasn't any sport in it.

If Sisko was white, it would not make the show any worse.

Ummmm, ackshually, this is demonstrably untrue for at least the episode Q-Less. Q was accustomed to pasty ass Starfleet officers like Picard. He was not prepared for fisticuffs with a real one.

Kirk would have totally punched Q, too. It's not a race thing, it's a Picard thing; he is insufficiently aggressive for a military officer (in the show, anyway; movie!Picard is almost a completely different character).

2025 has actually proved to be the year I stopped playing video games entirely, and it's basically directly because of this. I haven't logged into Steam since last spring. It's "exit vs. voice" again: if you can't change it, you have to leave it. If other people create things and I don't like them, my recourse is to avoid them. We can only control things we create ourselves.

It's not that I don't object to this situation - of course it's depressing and I wish it weren't this way; but on the other hand, nerd culture basically kicking me out has freed me up to do so many other things with my time. If video games had remained everything I wanted them to be, I don't know that that would actually be a good thing for my life. I honestly don't miss it anymore. For every hour I spent marveling at an incredible story, there were probably 100 hours of hacking my brain with the simulated feeling of achievement.

It's generally a good decision to stop playing video games, especially if you're pursuing more productive or healthy hobbies, like carpentry or backpacking. That said, I pretty much only play a handful of simulations which hardly have any ideological elements in them, let alone characters or a story, e.g. Factorio, Stationeers, Captain of Industry, etc.

I think the issue is that making games- especially big, prizewinning, AAA games- is inherently an artistic endeavor. And that attracts artist-types who are the most likely to be woke. Sure, the coders, testers, QA folks, etc might be chuds, but the ones making the creative decisions are highly susceptible to wokeness. It's not even about making money, they're just doing what they think is right. It's the same reason that Hollywood movies are so woke.

On the other hand, it kind of doesn't matter. There's so many games already made that no human can play them all in a lifetime. The technology has plateued so that new ones aren't any better than old ones- in fact with the RAM and GPU shortage, newer computers might actually be worse than old ones. We can easily immerse ourselves in old chud-made entertainment forever.

On the other hand, it kind of doesn't matter. There's so many games already made that no human can play them all in a lifetime.

And it kind of does, because the big budget games with the best graphics etc are the ones who don't dare to break with wokeism. If you have an absurdly expensive GPU, you want the most demanding games to be satisfying, to justify your purchase. Sure, there are more games than you could ever finish, but most of them aren't AAA.

I think that this sort of person- "I spent the maximum money for the latest and greatest GPU, and therefore I will buy the latest AAA games, regardless of how stupid they are-" is going to becoming a vanishingly rare part of the market. See also: "Guy who buys a new car every year" and "Guy who goes to Vegas every year."

It certainly used to be true that a better gaming system improved the quality of the rendered image, or improved frame rates to give a marginal competitive advantage (tried playing PowerPoint Quake? It's hard to hit enemies playing a slide show).

That said, I think the days of marginal GPU improvements improving the experience ended at least a decade ago. Yes, real-time ray tracing looks amazing, but honestly modern games aren't limited by graphics, but by mechanics and storytelling. Nintendo has known this for a while. My favorite games are ones that maximize novel, fun gameplay, not push triangles (Factorio, for example). But maybe there's a factor of me getting older and having nostalgia for older sorts of games. Heck, Roller Coaster Tycoon still manages to be a classic, despite being written in x86 assembly for a machine that probably underperforms some toasters today.

Honestly I think Hollywood has a version of the same pox: modern VFX makes it possible to realistically show pretty much anything. Effects alone no longer sell movies, and that puts more focus on the writing and directing.

You need a very good GPU to run new, graphically intensive games at the display's native 4K resolution (and higher). My next monitor will be a 5k2k one (11 million pixels whereas 4k is 8.3 million pixels).

Maybe it's that I still have older hardware, but the step change from 1080p to 4k seems a lot smaller than the previous generation jump from TV or DVD resolutions to 1080p. Do you find that playing at 4k native resolution dramatically improves the gaming experience? Again, it might be a selection bias that I've been playing fewer cutting-edge games.

Do you mind if I ask what titles you're playing?

I got an inkling you were a 1080p antiquarian when I read your first post. :P

Yes, there's a massive difference between 1080p and 4K. It's 4x the number of pixels. 8.3M vs 2.07M. Even going from 1080p to 1440p is a noticable upgrade in terms of monitors.

You're right that the jump from DVD (480p for NTSC, 576p for PAL) to 1080p was an even bigger change, at around 6x and 5x increases, respectively. And it's true that some people who have weak eyesight and/or sit very far from their TVs struggle to see much benefit from going further up in resolution. However, when you sit less than 15-20 feet from the TV and you have decent eyesight and you want to fill a let's say 65" TV with pixels, you will prefer 4K after seeing it in action, whether simply for displaying Windows programs or playing games or watching movies (beware that quite a few '4k releases' of movies are simply poor quality upscales from 1080p, false advertisements that will not reveal the true increase in quality that 4k can bring).

Framerates are another matter where the old implementation might still look okay to your perception, until you get used to something better, at which point you'll never want to go back. 60 hz looks very choppy to me now after using 120 and 144 hz for a few years. Playing a game at 24 fps would be totally absurd for me at this point. There's a bit of hedonic adaptation though. If saving on costs is your only priority, you might not want to try the upgraded alternatives, lest you lock yourself into a costlier habit. I deem that life is short and we only live once so why settle for staying with mediocrity.

What titles I play isn't all that relevant tbh, what matters is that I need to fill big displays (my ultrawide monitor or my TV) with the output from the GPU.

A 1440p monitor was a massive QoL improvement, both in gaming for a nice crispy UI, and for general productivity

Now I'm on a 38 inch ultrawide 3840*1600 and holy shit it's a massive upgrade in every way, it's glorious.

This man could afford a newish GPU!

What the woke in charge (brilliantly parodied with - put a chick in it and make it gay) don't understand is that execution matter. Problem is not that we have female leads, but that we don't have another Kate Archer or Bayonetta. Not that we have gay characters, but that we don't have Zevran or Leliana. Hades both 1 and 2 are woke as fuck and nobody cares. The problem is not that we have black lead assasins creed in japan. Problem is that the game is shit. And so on. No one wants ugly women - except the ugly women in charge of the projects.

There's a small faction that just dislikes the mere possibility, even in good games, often to completely inconsistent ends. It's funny that they end up the dark mirror to Saarkesian complaining about Bayonetta's lollypops without recognizing how much that parodied a Devil May Cry protagonist, but they still real. But they're also a small, if vocal, minority-of-a-minority.

A decent game buys a lot of patience. Hell, even games that are bad, but at least have some signs of passion going into them, get a lot of forbearance (example gratia: rayon spelled out that Palworld does Type 1 / Type 2 bodies, and no one cared).

These aren't disconnected phenomena, though: the reason people who suck at making games are in charge of making games is because they are there on woke credentials, making content you're supposed to be morally obligated to say you like.

You see a similar phenomena with Christian media. It's typically poor quality and watched by few because the people in charge of making it aren't there because they're good at their jobs; they're there because of their ideological commitment.

In both cases, the root of the problem is it's socially unacceptable to boot someone who is simply bad at their job for being bad at their job. You have to respect their moral commitment over their competence.

It's the same in politics, too. Bring your country to its knees with wasteful spending and idiotic policy? Not an issue worthy of dismissal. But touch someone's butt once in a bar in the '80s? Now that's the sort of person we cannot tolerate being in charge of anything important!

But touch someone's butt once in a bar in the '80s?

Obviously, that's why Trudeau was kicked out of office for wearing blackface and for groping a reporter.

It's all who/whom.

It's not really kto/kogo, it's more that when those who really run the show decide you need to go, these sorts of accusations magically become headshots instead of ricochets.

When the people actually running the show want you in power, you can be all over the Epstein files and nobody cares (or, rather, their caring is meaningless).

My point is just that nobody's ever removed for doing a terrible job. There's always a moral justification. The moral justification isn't the actual reason, of course: it's the pretense.

Fair enough, I'd agree with that.

Trudeau wasn't kicked out for the same reason Trump wasn't for so many things: he was ultimately answerable to the public.

Most cancellations would probably be short circuited if there was a public vote on them.

What matters to the woke execs is that the game is fun to play so it sells. If it's so woke it's bad then that's going to be an issue now that the economy is tough, but as long as it doesn't affect the core gameplay and the aesthetic toooo much, then it's gonna be woke all the way.

All the occupations required to work on game dev, or media, are overwhelmingly liberal or progressive. Even software engineers are only 16-27% conservative. They might not be on board with some of the woke extremes - same way not every conservative is an ethno-nationalist - but they’ll still support LGBT rights, and diversity initiatives. I would think that conservative software engineers are less likely to work in game development as well - why not work at Anduril where you get paid more and you don’t have to hide your political views?

Richard Hanania’s article on Why is Everything Liberal still applies. There’s no talent pool to make “non-woke” games. Plus, I never got the feeling that the market actually penalised wokeness at any point - my impression was that wokeness was used to shield mediocre work of criticism, or to excuse its underperformance.

That's a good argument about game media erring on the liberal side, but it's still weird how "woke" AAA games are, rather than borrowing from the broader liberal ethos. Not just in extremes, or some post-hoc sharpshooter's definition, but in what's being done specifically.

"Safe horny", as much as it gets smudged with tumblr associations, isn't actually a good representation of the (even post-Yahoo) tumblr ethos. Hell, I'm not even sure the Type I/Type II body thing is more compatible with trans thought than "masculine"/"feminine": you'd know better than I, but both the clean and smut-focused indie works I follow with trans readerships (and a few cases authorships) don't take that tack. Or for a non-video game example, compare Dungeons and Dragons to Super Lesbian Animal Adventure. The latter is much more left-wing and probably more offensive to soccons, but the former's got a lot more wokisms.

There is very much a talent pool for making non-woke media: it's called the country of Japan. Just because the West is incapable of making anything other than woke agitprop doesn't mean nobody else is.

I'm baffled by the concept of a game studio where the coding-level devs make decisions on the overall direction and themes of the game. Surely there are producers and executives analogous to movie productions with hire/fire power who set the parameters of the artistic output, no?

To add on to @gattsuru's reply, it's much more an issue of networking and reputation than any commitment to wokeness. The Warhorse community mod claimed the MC was straight in KCD1 due to resource constraints. Then Vavra himself admitted they "avoided accusations of sexism" by having the gay scenes, despite posturing as a lifelong chudler himself. But taken into full context, you get a clear picture: not a single creator, even the most accomplished, most influential ones on the planet can escape it anymore. You either pander to the woke, or you don't get to make big budget entertainment. You also get blacklisted from casting agencies, performance capture facilities, award shows, voice acting guilds, and get dropped by your publisher. Not to mention bogus allegations (see Chris Avellone, Alex Afriasiabi, Alec Holowka, Ashraf Ismail, etc etc). All this matters a lot. Above a certain project size, they made sure you can't do woke-free games in the west anymore. Only games developed and/or published by eastern companies can afford it these days. I'm curious to see how the Yakuza 3 Teruyuki Kagawa controversy pans out, the loudest calls for his removal seem to come from the west mostly.

I do think most mainstream media is still very woke. The battle for the media apparatus has just begun.

Also welcome back!

I mean, everything you mentioned would have been in development in 2024, when it was not known that Trump would be President and wokeness would be on the back foot.

My suspicion is that a ton of stuff being released this year was literally produced with the assumption that a Democrat would still be President.

The one that doesn't really have that excuse is South Park, since their episodes are, notoriously, very quick to produce and thus can reflect current events pretty readily.

I'd expect 2026 to show the first batch of media products that was created after it became clear that audiences were actually rejecting the excessive messaging and that there was a real demand for red-tribe (not necessarily right-wing) content.

One big sign of this is Taylor Sheridan's singlehanded dominance of TV right now, where he produces red-coded, masculine-heavy content that is wildly popular.

Another sign is the apparent collapse in the popularity of Hip-Hop and the return of Country music with a vengeance.

Another sign is the apparent collapse in the popularity of Hip-Hop and the return of Country music with a vengeance.

Thing is that hip hop is an incredibly "unwoke" genre in content if not allegiance. If these battles are no longer being fought it's cause the wokes accepted only a partial victory: rampant misogyny, actual toxic masculinity in gangster rap and barely-even-coded homophobia but the top talent are expected to toe the line if they want to go really mainstream. But the low end, especially the regional drill scenes? Can be functionally amoral.

I would think it's female pop stars like Beyonce that would be benefitting from consumption as a sign of loyalty and who you'd expect to drop off if we're past peak woke.

I think wokeness is the current name for a phenomenon which has infested Western culture for thousands of years.

So for example, consider biblical accounts of Jesus, who supposedly stood up for prostitutes and adulteresses. And proclaimed the poor are blessed, for theirs is the holy kingdom. While at the same time, stating that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

In other words, the idea of revering and exalting low status, marginalized groups while dunking on the (perceived) elites -- as a way of virtue signalling -- is an old idea. it's difficult to see it going away any time soon.

Slave morality.

Jesus, who supposedly stood up for prostitutes and adulteresses

"Go now, and sin no more." Does everyone forget that part?

Sounds like "amnesty for current immigrants, but then we will totally enforce the border, this time for real" to me, so forgetting it seems appropriate.

"Go now, and sin no more."

Sin no more, but if we do catch you sinning again probably nothing will happen. Not unless you push a random person off a subway platform.

They do. And they turn "her sins are forgiven because she loved much" into "see guys, she wasn't really a sex worker (though there's nothing wrong with that!), she just had a lot of boyfriends whom she really loved, so Jesus says sleeping around is fine so long as you love the guy".

The New Testament isn't really woke. It endorses man-woman marriage, especially monogamy, as the correct sexual paradigm, and condemns promiscuity and homosexuality. Even in the passage in John with the woman taken in adultery, it's true Jesus doesn't advocate for stoning her, but he also says, "Go and sin no more." The most dubious sexual thing I can think of in the New Testament is that it, with the Old Testament, explicitly upholds Lot as a righteous man, despite the fact that he's documented as getting drunk and having sex with his daughter (after he was rescued from Sodom!). And if once wasn't enough, he does it again with the other daughter. In any case, whatever difficulty (I love this term by theologians lol) one has with the Lot passages, this isn't the sort of sexual activity wokesters are advocating anyway. Woke advocates for the sexual activities that are explicitly condemned, not the behaviors righteous Lot was engaged in. Further, the New Testament is very patriarchal: it forbids female ministers, and in fact, says women shouldn't talk in church at all (which Christians women don't seem to take very seriously), and says women should not have authority over men. That's really, really not woke!

Now, on the financial side of things, I think the woke people have a lot more textual evidence to work with. But the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, is all over the place on this. On the one hand, many if not a majority of the good guys are wealthy. On the other hand, there are repeated condemnations of the wealthy, even in the Old Testament. Progressives' favorite passage from Ezekiel says: "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy." Christians get very upset about this, but frankly, the progressives are correct: Ezekiel highlights the prideful disregard of the poor, and doesn't even bother mentioning what Christians today often call Sodomy.

So, to the extent that the Bible is financially woke, it's not really a New Testament thing: i.e., it's not part of a mind virus concocted by the apostles to infect Rome and drive its fall, as seems to be the thesis on the Nazi right.

The New Testament isn't really woke.

That may very well but I wasn't claiming that the Christian Bible is woke. Rather, my position is that (1) modern wokeness is a manifestation of a more general phenomenon; and (2) that phenomenon has been around for a long time as evidenced by ideas contained in early Christianity.

As far as the question of whether the Christian Bible is woke or not goes, the answer turns on (1) how to define wokeness; and (2) how many woke elements must be included in a work before it should be considered woke overall.

If you define "be kind to those less fortunate" as woke, sure, Christianity is woke. But I think that's a very dubious definition of woke. I'm not aware of any successful real-world culture that has the smoothbrained barbaric machismo that the dissident right seems to think is the essence of real civilization.

The same culture that brought you the Nanjing Massacre has this guy as a legendary ninja hero.

If you define "be kind to those less fortunate" as woke, sure,

I imagine that wokies themselves would define wokeness along these lines.

But I think that's a very dubious definition of woke.

Well, I think that "being kind to the unfortunate" is often present, but it's a kind of camouflage for attacks on the perceived elite / outgroup. Implying that it's essentially impossible for wealthy people to be good people -- that's something I would say is pretty woke by any reasonable definition.

By the way, I'm not claiming that Christianity is woke, just that it has woke elements, if "woke" is broadly defined.

Are you familiar with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals? He criticizes Christianity for being a morality for slaves, of sour grapes insisting that being poor, meek, weak and passive was actually good, and that being strong, rich, mighty and proud was bad. The notion certainly rhymes with how woke oppressed/oppressor dynamics and the oppression Olympics plays out.

I'm familiar with his thesis. I'm just saying Christianity only fits his narrative when you pick and choose certain aspects of it. Which, to be fair, is what Christians typically do lol

But to be even more fair: the parts they selectively choose to ignore are often the parts most aligned with Nietzsche's thesis. Paul says don't rebel against the government (and he's under the Roman government! Not a fairly reasonable government like Britain's!)? Can't hear you over my #1776, baby! Christians, if anything, are the most celebratory of the colonial rebellion of all America's demographics.

Woke isn't strictly oppression olympics, that would imply they have equitable empathy for all subaltern classes. It's specifically about furthering the interests of women, blacks, muslims and LGBT, at the expense of the male, white, straight, Christian demographics. The "oppression" bit is just a moral cover. Things like sexism and bigotry garner more engagement than the far more impactful class politics. Woke will always favour an upper class black girl over a homeless white man.

Christianity goes a lot further than "be kind to the less fortunate," though. The last shall be first, the meek will inherit the Earth, God chose the weak things to shame the strong, etc. That does seem like a radical change from, well, the history of the universe, and it doesn't seem crazy to see a connection between that and Wokeness.

Christianity goes a lot further than "be kind to the less fortunate," though.

FWIW "be kind to the less fortunate" seems like a motte to me. In the same way that a modern day wokie would claim that they are just trying to help disadvantaged people a bit, but they would never ever hire an unqualified person and they are absolutely not trying to replace white people.

the meek will inherit the Earth

I mean, this is basically "them darn thespians and homo sapiens." The word "meek" is is πραΰς, which as you can see on the Wiki, is more like gentle, related to the root for likeable/well-disposed. Heck, the example usage there is from the Victory Odes: "the king who rules Syracuse, gentle to his citizens"

As for the first being last and the last being first, well... I present to you the word gentleman.

If you're looking for the wokes in the Bible, I think you must examine the Pharisees, most of all. They're the moralistic, hypocritical wokescolds of the time and place, afaik.

If you're looking for the wokes in the Bible, I think you must examine the Pharisees, most of all.

I'm not familiar with the Pharisees so I can't really comment on this.

They're the moralistic, hypocritical wokescolds of the time and place, afaik.

Generally speaking, what did they do or say?

I haven't read much of the Bible myself, only seen and heard excerpts.

But the Pharisees were performative purity spiralers who tried to cancel Jesus. They followed the letter of the law and not the spirit of it. When Jesus went to heal a sick man on the Sabbath, they wanted to get him for this, because he 'worked on the day of rest'. They were all about strict external conformity rather than the individual inner journey towards divinity.

They showed no mercy towards the unclean or rule-breakers, while Jesus did, such as eating with prostittues, tax-collectors, sinners.

They had Jesus marked as an enemy and tried to trip him up with impossible questions that would make him unpopular, like whether Roman taxation was right or not, which if you say yes you get the Jewish nationalists against you and if you say no you are guilty of sedition, so Jesus just said renter unto Caesaer that which is Caesar's and render unto God that which is God's.

Jesus said to them: You create your "whitewashed tombs", beautiful outside but filled with dead bones on the inside.

Simply criticizing the powerful or standing up for the weak is not what's wrong with wokeism. Far from it. That's not even what they really do.

But the Pharisees were performative purity spiralers who tried to cancel Jesus. They followed the letter of the law and not the spirit of it. When Jesus went to heal a sick man on the Sabbath, they wanted to get him for this, because he 'worked on the day of rest'. They were all about strict external conformity rather than the individual inner journey towards divinity.

I wouldn't call that "woke" in the way the word is normally used.

They showed no mercy towards the unclean or rule-breakers, while Jesus did, such as eating with prostittues, tax-collectors, sinners.

I wouldn't call that "woke" in the way the word is normally used.

Simply criticizing the powerful or standing up for the weak is not what's wrong with wokeism

Agreed. But doing so in a manner that is unfair, dishonest, and performative -- that's the very essence of wokism. The wokie claims to be "punching up" as he slanders and abuses his victims.

There’s a conspiracy theory going around that Jason from GTA VI was going to be killed off in the first hour or so of the game, and the only playable character was the Latina gangbanger. Then the woke stuff started to recede, and Rockstar had to delay the game for two years in order to actually add him in as a playable character.

That’s insane when the leaks from like 5+ years ago that correctly named Jason and Lucia said they would be dual protagonists.

Despite the marketing push for the female leads in RPGs like AC Odyssey, Mass Effect and Cyberpunk heavily pushing the female leads into the marketing, the actual buyer demographic heavily prefer the male lead in all the games.

As a straight, cis-by-default guy, I have a mild preference for female characters. Not sure if that makes me crypto-trans or something. Here is my reasoning:

  • For 3rd person view games: if I have to stare at the ass of my PC for 80 hours, I prefer staring at a female backside.
  • Romance-option wise, I am fine with lesbian content, but don't care for gay content. For straight content, I mildly prefer my character being the guy, but for example in BG3 'PC vs NPC party member' is pretty much a distinction without a difference. (Of course, I played a female Lolthsworn Dark Urge necromancer, which is fairly far from my real world persona. The class turned out to be a mistake, I was under the impression that I would get Finger of Death (& WotB) eventually. In 2nd and 3rd ed these were actually useful.)
  • I guess my PC gender preference inverts if there is a lot promiscuity going on, for example in Witcher 1, I would prefer playing a slutty Gerald who gets a lot of pussy to a hypothetical slutty Geraldine who gets a ton of cock, possibly with a collection of risque cards of all the guys my PC has fucked. Outside of Witcher 1 and straightforward porn games, this is rarely a dominating concern.

I think that for mainstream games like ME or Cyberpunk, there is enough demand for female main characters that it makes sense to provide both options, even if you have to cast some lines with two sets of pronouns.

I agree with your points on story-writing, though. A thinly veiled allegory for whatever the cause of the day is (no matter the political leaning) rarely makes for an engaging story.

Just sounds like you're a straight man tbh. And I've yet to be persuaded that "cis-by-default" means anything.

"Cis-by-default" is trying to motion toward the difference between the sort of straight guy who'd react to a Ranma'ing by poking his own breasts and giggling for three hours straight, and the sort who'd immediately douse their head in boiling water. (To turn back into a man, right?)

Ozy originally had a poll from somewhere saying some sizable number of men in that situation claimed that they'd go full suicidal, but I can't find it or any real references to it, so I can't look back at how well-designed it was, and even the summary had a lot of questions unanswered about how performative that claim was. But from a revealed preferences sense, you do get a lot of similar outputs: most obvious in smut where some fraction of guys get really uncomfortable with (especially but not only VR) female protagonist games even in F/F-only contexts, but also more subtly the difference between guys that are bored by and those that are outraged by having to learn about woman-specific things like traditional makeup use.

That said, yeah, I agree quiet_NaN doesn't seem crypto-trans. I've clocked people wrong before, but at minimum I'd expect a crypto-trans person to either really like the gay romance option or at least mention the lesbian option for an alternate universe Witcher 1, even crypto-trans people that don't fit Blanchard's typology.

The point of "cis-by-default" is that most people don't have a "gender identity" in the sense that transactivists use the term. (Google AI provides the definition "Gender identity is a person's internal, deeply felt sense of being a man, woman, both, neither, or another gender..." which I think is consistent with transactivist use). I don't have an internal, deeply felt sense of being a man - I just am one. The question of "how would you feel if you woke up in a female body?" doesn't make sense - I am my body as well as my brain, and the person who had a female body (complete with different musculature, menstruation, gonads that secrete oestrogen etc.) would be a different person.

I think the concept of gender identity is incoherent and nobody has a gender identity - some people have preferred gender roles that don't match their biological sex, and some people have fetishes which mean they can get off by performing a gender role that doesn't match their biological sex. But if tomboys and femme queens think they "really are" the other sex it is because transactivists tell them to, not because they have an "internal, deeply felt sense of being..."

The thing with Cis-by-default is that the whole point of a default is that you don‘t need to describe it. You can save those bits of information. If you refer to someone as a man, all the default qualities are implied – het, ‚cis‘, normal in every way - unless otherwise specified. Queer theory and the trans movement produce verbal pollution, forcing people to specify useless information we leave out/imply („my pronouns are he/him“). Because they‘re autists who have a hard time with implicit clues. Instead of brave rebels asking questions no one dared to, they force people to repeat answers everyone already knew.

This isn't really what the meaning of cis by default is. It's the trans attempt to square the circle that a lot of people, when asked how they'd feel if they had the body of the opposite sex to make them empathize with the trans discomfort, just shrug their shoulders because besides logistics it just wouldn't be that big of a deal

The question of "how would you feel if you woke up in a female body?" doesn't make sense - I am my body as well as my brain, and the person who had a female body (complete with different musculature, menstruation, gonads that secrete oestrogen etc.) would be a different person.

You can imagine a sci-fi scenario where your brain is transplanted into a female body. You’d still be you. Exposure to oestrogen would change your personality to an extent, but it wouldn’t be instantaneous, and it would be a lot more limited than if you had been exposed to it in the womb or during childhood.

Now of course brain transplants are currently purely theoretical but cross-sex hormone therapy isn’t. Cis men who have taken oestrogen (more common in the past to treat testicular or prostate cancer) report higher incidences of depression, anxiety, body image issues from feminisation, loss of libido and sexual dysfunction, and emotional volatility.

Meanwhile trans women usually report the opposite and their mental health is improved from the exact same hormones. Weirder anecdotal reports are cis men complaining of brain fog from taking oestrogen, while trans women saying the hormones actually lifted their brain fog.

Meanwhile trans women usually report the opposite and their mental health is improved from the exact same hormones. Weirder anecdotal reports are cis men complaining of brain fog from taking oestrogen, while trans women saying the hormones actually lifted their brain fog.

Would you mind providing a link to this study? I've heard the opposite from the recent controversy over the "mermaids" charity and Cass review, so I'd be interested to see the other perspective on it.

You’d still be you.

It's actually very much in doubt to what extent "you" resides in your brain specifically -- the nervous system is much more complicated than that.

Cis men who have taken oestrogen (more common in the past to treat testicular or prostate cancer)

You don't think that those symptoms could be related to, y'know -- having cancer at all?

The original essay is available online. I get that you're trying to reject its assumptions, but I don't think you're really succeeding at it so much as arguing over definitions.

If we replace the Ranma or Ozy's thought experiment instead with "how would you react if a mad-but-exceptionally-skilled plastic surgeon kidnapped you and gave you the exact outside appearance and vocal patterns of the opposite gender, without messing with your gonads, menses, yada yada; we'll call the population that had this done to them momen and sound like a bad scifi flick, they're tots not women-in-your-specific-sense", and one half of the subject population immediately slit their own throat, and the other half got slightly annoyed about having to replace their wardrobe and learn how bras work, it'd be compatible with your claim and Ozy's.

"how would you react if a mad-but-exceptionally-skilled plastic surgeon kidnapped you and gave you the exact outside appearance and vocal patterns of the opposite gender, without messing with your gonads, menses, yada yada; we'll call the population that had this done to them momen and sound like a bad scifi flick, they're tots not women-in-your-specific-sense"

Eh, this doesn't quite fit because I'd be going from it being easy to play my biological role to it being difficult to play my biological role. You really can't dispense with the fully functional for phenotypical sex shift, that's load bearing.

This is probably something that's just inaccessible to me, but would that really solve that many people's discomfort? If biological role means reproduction, I can give examples of people who'd be happier if they could knock someone else up by scissoring hard enough, but the latter is one of the rarest kinks I've ever seen. Guys who'd want female reproductive organs and get knocked up are more common... and still one of the central examples of kinks most straight guys are extremely uncomfortable with.

If it's something about muscles or hunter/gatherer breakdown, that seems less likely to directly squick, but more likely to just not have a lot of people care and a few people really care.

This is probably something that's just inaccessible to me, but would that really solve that many people's discomfort?

It being inaccessible is I guess the point, but yeah, I'd much rather become fully female than stuck in between, which is one of the things that horrifies me about the whole 'transition as medicine' because it really can't deliver. Being stuck between would mostly distress me because I'd have a broken body that can't really do either gender role, it would be like finding myself crippled. It's not even just strictly the whole form baby thing, although that alone would be huge, but it would make all sorts of relationships more strange.

The whole thing about being cis by default is that you can offload a lot of whatever it is trans people claim to feel about their social dissonance onto just following these really straightforward scripts. I'm a guy, I can wear the normal guy clothes, go to the gym and follow a bro split to get moderately good results, and a thousand other things that pretty much just work. If I'm stuck in between then I'm in the wilderness. Nothing is designed for you, even if you pass then there is a surprise penis you need to explain to perspective partners.

That may all seem pretty trivial to someone with a strong sense of gender, and it all really is logistics, but hopefully it serves to highlight that it isn't the girlness or boyness that bothers me, it is the logistics and a full transition just has intrinsically better logistics. I think this reflects the intent behind the original cis by default concept because it avoids the whole being crippled thing and tests only if you care a lot about the girlness or boyness.

arguing over definitions.

Guilty as charged. Fundamental to my position on trans issues is that the concept of a "gender identity" as used by transactivists is probably incoherent, and if coherent does not describe a real thing. That requires trying to clarify the definition of a concept whose authors made it deliberately slippery in order to support motte-and-bailey arguments.

There is a much saner argument you can have about trans issues if you conduct the argument in terms of generally accepted concepts. Some men want to live as women (and vice versa), and potentially take drugs and have cosmetic surgeries to allow them to do so more effectively. Should adults be allowed to do this? (Default answer given the basic assumptions of Western liberal society is "yes" on the usual liberal grounds) Should children? (Head exploding issue in western society - there is a vast class of issues about how the State as parens patriae and the actual parents share authority over and responsibility for children who are too young to effectively exercise their own freedom and we don't have satisfactory answers.) Should people who do this be protected by anti-discrimination laws? (marginal - it's about as strong a case for the T as for the LGB)

But that isn't the argument that the trans movement want to have. I'm not the one who made this about the meaning of words - it started when a powerful political movement tried to make the meaning of the word "woman" a central political issue.

Yeah I'd suspect most people who play female characters are straight men as well. The actual "female gamer" demographic is likely much smaller than most would admit.

if I have to stare at the ass of my PC for 80 hours, I prefer staring at a female backside.

The Mass Effect 2 character has a phenomenal ass. It was the first time I picked a girl character and it was a great call

Just to add to that list, I was fairly excited for IT: Welcome to Derry because the IT TV special is one of my favorite horror movies, but Welcome to Derry is the most abysmal woke slop you could imagine. The theme of the show is that racism is scarier than Pennywise. We know this is the theme because the Rabbi told his son in the first episode- reality is scarier than fantasy and Jews know better than anyone the horror of reality, with the reality anecdote used by the father to demonstrate "reality as scarier than fantasy" to his son ironically being the lie that Jews were turned into lampshades at Buchenwald- pretty ironic the writers chose a fantasy and huge lie to drive home the theme of reality being scarier than fantasy. Then that night his son gets attacked by Pennywise in the form of a human-skin lampshade.

That just set the stage though- at least half the cast is black, and of course they are all the noble, intelligent, upstanding characters while all the white characters are evil, bumbling, and dysfunctional. The most unforgiveable part is that most of the drama is dedicated to rehashing "Black experience in American South" but just Copy + Pasting it to Derry Maine with all the memes, featuring a black woman with a heavy southern accent as the hero fighting Racism in Derry with absolutely no new angle or artistic interpretation.

What to make of it? Woke isn't dead because Hollywood changed its mind, it's dead because the spell was broken among a critical mass of the laity. So either Hollywood and gaming will change, or they won't change and there will just be this persistent conflict that ruins everything. I read the Reddit reviews of different episodes to get a feeling for how far off my take on the show is from the average Redditor, and it's miles away. Obviously there's a selection bias but the median redditor still eats this slop up- "omg I loved the scene where the Cuban kid played drums in the happy Black jazz club, it really set the stage for next episode when the white people come and kill them all."

Edit: Expedition 33 was not woke at all though. The cast featured a diverse crew, and then 99% of the diversity was killed off at the very beginning of the first act, and virtually the entire cast is white and the story centers on familial relations within an unambiguously ethnically French family, with sympathetic interpretations of each character and there is just no wokeness at all. And people loved it.

I was curious about Expedition 33, and watched a few Vtubers playing it, and I have no problems admitting that my interest in purchasing said game was killed when I saw the random black guy pop up out of nowhere.

Hearing that he gets killed off... Well, I dunno. Maybe I'll pick it up on a 90% off sale or something down the road in a few years.

It's a funny bait and switch. They check off the "diversity" box in the Prologue and pay it no mind whatsoever in the entire story itself. The story is about a white family and it's actually interesting.

FWIW, blacks in Paris aren't exactly unheard of.

"Who was in Paris, Senpai?"

Yeah "Welcome to Derry" was awful. The military subplot was a narrative stop sign, the Indians were a time-consuming macguffin factory, we don't need another story based around horcruxes I mean infinity stones I mean magic shards or whatever dumb crap that was, completely unneccessary to the plot, there was like thirty characters too many, the monster was weirdly focused on horrific simulated childbirth scenes (somebody's fetish, obv). Just a disaster on every level.

I've heard that of Expedition 33, but I'm very vary of the sequel syndrome which most "unwoke" western IPs end up becoming. Everyone's excited for Blood of Dawnwalker, which is going to be a saga, and that alone has killed off most of my hope for it.

... because even "beloved classics" like Cyberpunk featured LGBT themes.

Okay, this is a nitpick.

There was the MtF bartender at the Afterlife with the street racing line of sidequests, and that did feel preachy. And there were the gay romance options. Did I miss anything else?

On the other hand, you have Fingers, the ripperdoc who has made himself androgynous and is unambiguously a villain, in a way clearly tied to his sexuality, in a major quest. I was pretty surprised they'd go there. I felt like they did a good job of preserving the setting's themes even when they were in tension with the mores of the current year.

Arguably the racial updates, making the setting less white, were more progressive. They were in line with the tech updates, though, splitting the difference between retro-future and future-future. So I have mixed feelings.

The way they handled religion was pretty bad in general, but I can only speculate as to motives there.

The LGBT stuff wasn't more than I would expect from a cyberpunk open world game. Probably a bit less than expected? In fact if you gave your male character no dick he could never have sex with any character, IIRC. Bold!

Also whenever you played as Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves) you were always doing straight sex/straight womanizing. I wonder if he specifically refused to do queer stuff or they just didn't want to go there since he's supposed to be a macho anarchist punk rocker.

OTOH the sheer volume of badass girlbosses and best hackers/netrunners being girls was quite overwrought.

Silverhand is canonically a practicing bisexual, but it only comes up if you go into a gay bar to start with. Reeves has worked that sorta blue more overtly in the past, with My Own Private Idaho, but he's also played a lot of bi-or-gay-in-other-media characters that dropped the theme in translation, most notoriously with the in-name-only Constantine film.

I stand corrected!

IIRC wasn't Cyberpunk the first RPG to do the body type shtick? The Chromebooks do mention that tech is fully capable of swapping out male and female sexual organs, but the intent behind that line was to demonstrate the ascent of body mod technology rather than an LGBT allegory. Sure you could rationalise this as appropriate for the setting, but this still reflects real world 21st century politics which was absent in older cyberpunk literature. Now every RPG has done away with male/female binaries.

Re religion, again I agree but honestly, not surprised. Most modern media have been repeating the same screeds about the "evils of religion" for decades. It's a high schooler's understanding of depth. Deus Ex was much more cerebral IMO.

Going OT I don't know if you've heard of the standalone Forgotten City or the Skyrim mod, but I was similarly asking myself how THIS could've won writer's guild awards? It was literally just Dark City. I suspect the social justice rhetoric crowbarred into the dialogues played no small part in that.

IIRC wasn't Cyberpunk the first RPG to do the body type shtick?

Fair! I don’t know if it was first, but it was definitely early. I can’t believe I forgot that.

Arguably the racial updates, making the setting less white, were more progressive. They were in line with the tech updates, though, splitting the difference between retro-future and future-future. So I have mixed feelings.

I still think the most preposterous and unbelievable parts of the game are not the wokeness or girlbosses or most of the tech, or that huge parts of SF have become the Tenderloin, but that SF has significantly more mega skyscrapers by 2077.

Conversely, people are taking note of this.

If you go by Steam, people just find the newest stuff rather lackluster. How the market adapts to this - if ever - will be interesting to play out. It's not as if it would be the first Video Game market crash we've seen...

Not at all a gamer, but I am an avid reader. And contemporary literature has many of the same issues (with different inflections) as video games.

My solution: exit. For the past year, I've only read books written in the 20th century, and it's been such a breath of fresh air. Instead of endless variations of progressive morality tales adapted to different settings, you get genuine variety of perspectives. Mentioning this elsewhere, the usual response is "oh, so you're just reading dead white men instead," but it's not at all that. You get writers of both sexes and all races bringing new perspectives to the table. Currently I'm reading an excellent memoir by a bisexual, Jewish, female software engineer, and you get none of the drivel that would be put to the page today.

This may have limited applicability to gamers: games are more social, require a much greater investment to produce, and the average game in 2025 is better (I assume) than the average game in 1995, despite wokeness. Which points to the problem for people wanting better video games today. So long as people are buying the ones produced, that's what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do besides quit altogether.

My solution: exit. For the past year, I've only read books written in the 20th century, and it's been such a breath of fresh air.

Exit has been my solution as well. Hollywood/Netflix/tv wants to serve nothing but slop? The NFL has all the aesthetics of a rap video? Guess I'll pass on all of it.

Mentioning this elsewhere, the usual response is "oh, so you're just reading dead white men instead,"

And the correct answer is yeschad. They were the good writers.

And the correct answer is yeschad. They were the good writers.

They are disproportionately the best writers: e.g. no writers really compare with McCarthy or Pynchon IMO. But it's a continuum, and there are non white male writers who are genuinely great. E.g. Didion, O'Connor. Still absolutely worth setting aside a couple hours for (and worth your time far more than another round of Netflix slop or shit posting).

Although, I appreciate the idea of saying "fuck you" to people who say I'm morally flawed unless I implement affirmative action in my reading choices.

Currently I'm reading an excellent memoir by a bisexual, Jewish, female software engineer, and you get none of the drivel that would be put to the page today.

Can you name it? This sounds interesting.

Close to the Machine, by Ellen Ullman.

There's been a concerted effort to create a female fandom for all the male oriented IPs to expand their TAM, especially in gaming where the average budgets keep ballooning every year. The rationale is that male gamers (existing fandom) will remain loyal to the IP and get incalculated into feminism. But females need to be interested. So do away with the fratboy culture! Let HR screen the environment, kick out the milquetoast Gen X techbros and onboard woke millennial women. Accommodate all of their favourite social justice causes (BLM, LGBTQ). Fight the male gaze!

This is not a rationale; this is a rationalization for what they wanted to do anyway. The idea of "let's alienate our existing customers because they'll buy anyway, so we can just cater to the new customers we want at no cost" is pants-on-head stupid to begin with. It'd be like cigarette companies trying to cater to the health-nut demographic... by removing the nicotine. When they do it and it DOESN'T WORK and they keep doing it, the already transparent rationalization just falls apart.

This is not a rationale; this is a rationalization for what they wanted to do anyway. The idea of "let's alienate our existing customers because they'll buy anyway, so we can just cater to the new customers we want at no cost" is pants-on-head stupid to begin with. It'd be like cigarette companies trying to cater to the health-nut demographic... by removing the nicotine. When they do it and it DOESN'T WORK and they keep doing it, the already transparent rationalization just falls apart.

Agreed. Also, they generally don't take female oriented IPs and change them to make them more attractive to a male audience.

Also, they generally don't take female oriented IPs and change them to make them more attractive to a male audience.

I know you said "generally", but I seem to remember reading (probably here) that the My Little Pony phenomenon was due to them doing exactly that. I vaguely recall reading something that basically said that the way they'd designed it to appeal to young boys was by including a lot more adventure/hero's journey elements than are usually present in girl's media, and I explicitly remember them mentioning something along the lines of "we know boys won't go out of their way to watch it, but if it's on because their sister is watching it, we want them to watch it too."

Which plays a lot more into @The_Nybbler's point - it is definitely possible to make media that is intended for men, and extend the appeal to women as well without compromising what men like about it. Which implies that they are making it woke because that's what they want to do, not to expand their audience.

Right. "We can add female-friendly elements without scaring the dudes" isn't a pants-on-head stupid plan. It might be hard and it might not work, but the idea isn't categorically dumb. "We can completely aim for a female audience and the dudes will have no choice but to stay and we'll get the women too" IS pants-on-head stupid.

Wasn't this the same plan behind the Pearl Harbor movie?

Right. "We can add female-friendly elements without scaring the dudes" isn't a pants-on-head stupid plan. It might be hard and it might not work, but the idea isn't categorically dumb. "We can completely aim for a female audience and the dudes will have no choice but to stay and we'll get the women too" IS pants-on-head stupid.

I agree, but I would add that they don't even necessarily aim for a female audience. For example, consider the uglification of female characters in video games. Your average woman is okay with (and sometimes prefers) female characters who are physically attractive. Maybe she is not excited about a female character who is close to completely naked most of the time (although even with that a lot of women don't mind), but a female character who is beautiful, sexy, and tastefully dressed is, generally speaking, a positive for female gamers. And yet there has been a trend of making video games with female characters who are downright ugly.

I know you said "generally", but I seem to remember reading (probably here) that the My Little Pony phenomenon was due to them doing exactly that. I vaguely recall reading something that basically said that the way they'd designed it to appeal to young boys was by including a lot more adventure/hero's journey elements than are usually present in girl's media, and I explicitly remember them mentioning something along the lines of "we know boys won't go out of their way to watch it, but if it's on because there sister is watching it, we want them to watch it too."

Thanks for posting this. If true, that's fascinating.

Which plays a lot more into @The_Nybbler's point - it is definitely possible to make media that is intended for men, and extend the appeal to women as well without compromising what men like about it. Which implies that they are making it woke because that's what they want to do, not to expand their audience.

I guess the most charitable interpretation is that they have a poor mental model of the typical male viewer.

Found the link, if you're curious:

https://www.themotte.org/post/2732/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/358520?context=8#context

The quote I was thinking of:

Boys (believe it or not): They won't admit it, but they'll watch. When their sister’s watching it, they'll balk and act like it’s dumb, then they'll sit down and watch it. For the same reason Moms will find My Little Pony interesting enough to happily share with their daughters, the compelling conflicts, the strong characterizations, the silly humor and (most importantly for boys) the ADVENTURE, the boys will watch, too. Really

Yeah and when it DOES work, I suspect it's usually more MEN bought the game than usual, rather than increased female gamers. I still stand by my point though. I would suspect corporate push to get young boys to play with dolls has a similar angle. But there probably are heaps of people in marketing who do believe gendered preferences are a matter of "socialising".

Yes; the usual way to attract female costumers into a male IP is to toss in a romance subplot, such as Han/Leia in Star Wars. Putting a chick in it and making her gay and lame attracts nobody, as has been empirically proven. The reason they keep doing it is because modern games and movies are made by people who hate the IP, and hate its fans.

We Have Taiwan At Home

There is a story that Su Shi, the great Song Dynasty poet, was exiled to Hainan in 1097. At the time, this was a death sentence. The island was a malarial backwater, the literal end of the known world, inhabited by "barbarians" and venomous snakes. Su Shi, being a stoic and a gourmand, reportedly (and perhaps apocryphally) made the best of it by learning to cook oysters and writing poems about how nice the weather was. Fast forward a millennium, and the Communist Party of China has decided that Su Shi's place of exile is the future of global capitalism.

On the 18th of December, 2025, Beijing officially "closed" the customs border around Hainan. This sounds bad. Usually, when you close a border, it means tanks are rolling in. In this case, it means the opposite: Hainan is now treated as a separate customs territory for goods, with a "first line" between the island and the rest of the world and a "second line" between the island and the mainland. The Reuters headline calls it a "$113 billion free-trade experiment." The details are drastic, the implications, as far as I can tell, immense. If you are a foreign company, you can ship a wide range of inputs into Hainan, subject to a negative-list regime, tariff-free. If you process those goods there, adding just 30% value under the Free Trade Port's eligibility and supervision rules, you can sell them into mainland China with zero tariffs (while import VAT and consumption taxes may still apply, depending on the product).

This is the "Hainan Free Trade Port", and if the Chinese government is to be believed, it is the successor to Hong Kong, a pilot for joining the CPTPP, and a strategic hedge against a hostile trade war with the US, all rolled into one tropical island.

This is a very big deal. It is also, depending on who you ask, either a big brain play at "dual circulation" economics or a doomed attempt to simulate a free market inside a panopticon. I for one, tend towards optimism.

Let's look at the mechanics, because they are fascinatingly game able. I suspect that might even be the intent:

The core purpose of the Hainan FTP is what we might call the 30% Loophole.

Under normal circumstances, if you want to sell a widget to a consumer in Shanghai, you pay a tariff. If that widget comes from a country currently annoyed with China (or vice versa), that tariff might be punitive. I wonder why tariffs have been a hot topic of late.

Under the new Hainan rules, the flow looks like this:

  • Import raw materials or components into Hainan (Tariff: 0%).
  • Do "processing" in Hainan that increases the value by 30%.
  • Ship the finished product to Shanghai (Tariff: 0%). This sounds like a standard Free Trade Zone, but the scale is different. Most FTZs are fenced-off industrial parks near airports. Hainan is an entire province of 10 million people. It is a vacation destination.

Imagine if the USGov declared that Florida was a separate customs entity. You could ship French wine or Japanese steel into Miami tax-free. If you turned the steel into a car in Orlando, you could sell it to New York tariff-free.

Perhaps just as important, the tax regime is aggressive. Qualifying firms in encouraged sectors can access a 15% corporate income tax rate (versus the standard 25%), and eligible "high-end" or "urgently needed" talent can be brought down to an effective 15% personal rate via refunds of the portion above 15%. This is a direct shot at Singapore and Hong Kong.

The economic incentives here are powerful. The "30% value added" is a low bar. The accounting details matter: bill of materials, processing costs, overhead; but 30% is low enough that assembly, testing, packaging, and integration often get you there. If I were a German chemical company or a Japanese electronics manufacturer, I'd be looking at this and calculating the margin. You can bypass the Great Wall of Tariffs by setting up a factory in Haikou.

Why is Beijing doing this?

The standard answer is "economic growth." China's FDI dropped ~ 10% in the first three quarters of 2025. The property sector is still a mess. They need a win.

But the specific timing and structure suggest two other motivations: The Hong Kong Problem and The CPTPP Gambit:

Hong Kong used to be the interface between China and the world. It was the airlock. You could keep the mainland pressurized with communism and capital controls, while Hong Kong remained a vacuum of common law and free capital. It worked great until 2019-2020, when the airlock started leaking politics. Beijing has effectively integrated Hong Kong politically, but in doing so, they damaged its unique value proposition. Trust in Hong Kong's distinct legal system has eroded. The "Hainan Option" is an attempt to build a backup airlock.

The theory goes: We don't need the British Common Law or colonial judges to have a financial hub. We can just simulate the economic conditions of Hong Kong (low tax, free trade) without the political pains (protests, foreign judges).

On the other hand:

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is the trade deal that the US abandoned under Trump, leaving Japan and others to run it. It has very high standards for data flows, labor rights, and state-owned enterprises.

China wants in. Joining CPTPP would be a geopolitical coup, effectively isolating the US from the Pacific trade architecture. But China, as currently constituted, cannot meet the standards. The state subsidies are too high; the data laws are too strict. Hainan is the "pilot." The Reuters article quotes Vice Premier He Lifeng calling it a "vital gateway." The idea is to adopt CPTPP-compliant rules only in Hainan. If it works, they can tell the trade bloc, "Look, we can do it. There's enough trade in the Pacific without the US wagging its dick at us."

The skepticism here is high. As one diplomat noted in the Reuters piece, CPTPP members generally demand nationwide commitments, not just a gated playground for pilot projects. Beijing hopes Hainan will serve as a proof of concept; trade negotiators suspect it will be a showpiece rather than a structural reform.

Will it work?

If you are a fan of Gravity Models of Trade, you should be bullish (I do not know enough to claim to be an expert, I'm just doing this because it's been a few days and nobody else has bothered). Hainan sits right in the middle of the South China Sea, one of the busiest shipping lanes on earth. It is closer to Vietnam and the Philippines than Shanghai is. If you lower friction/tariffs in a high-gravity area/massive population centers, trade will happen. The physics of economics demand it. If you are a fan of Institutional Economics (think Acemoglu and Robinson), you should be skeptical.

The institutionalist argument is that Hong Kong worked not because of the tax rate, but because of the Rule of Law. If you had a contract dispute in Hong Kong, you knew a judge in a wig would apply English common law, regardless of what the Party Secretary thought.

Hainan does not have judges in wigs. It has the People's Courts. The "Hainan Free Trade Port Law" passed in 2021 promises protection for foreign investors, but we have seen how quickly laws can change when they conflict with "national security."

However, there is a middle path: the "Good Enough" Equilibrium.

Foreign capital might not need perfect British Common Law. It might just need "predictable enough" rules and "high enough" profits. If the 30% value-add loophole generates a 20% increase in net margin for a German carmaker, they might be willing to tolerate the risk that the local court is biased.

Dubai is a good comparison here. Dubai is more chocolate than it is a democracy. It does not have English Common Law (though the DIFC does). But it functions as a global hub because the ruling family understands that screwing over foreign investors is bad for business. If Hainan can establish a reputation for "commercial neutrality", even within an authoritarian state, it could siphon off a lot of the manufacturing-adjacent services that are currently leaving Hong Kong.

There is also the Trump Factor (implied by the fact that 2025 of all years is the date of implementation). If the US is ramping up tariffs on "China," Hainan offers a fascinating shell game.

If a product is made in Vietnam, shipped to Hainan for "processing," and then shipped to Europe, what is its origin? If a product is made in Hainan and shipped to the US, does it get hit with the "China Tariff"?

Probably yes. Customs agents are not stupid (alas). Outside China, origin is usually about substantial transformation or "last substantial transformation," often implemented through tariff classification changes or specific processing rules, not the Free Trade Port's internal 30% threshold.

But for the rest of the world, Hainan offers a way to interact with the Chinese economy without the full weight of mainland protectionism. The "30% value add" rule effectively turns Hainan into a giant mixing vat. You pour in global commodities, stir them with Chinese labor (which is still cost-competitive for high-skill work), and pour out a "Hainan" product. This helps China move up the value chain. Instead of just being the "World's Factory" (doing the scutwork), they become the "World's Processor" (high value add-ons).

Let's look at the numbers again. Hainan's GDP is $113 billion. Hong Kong's is $407 billion. To catch up, Hainan needs to grow at explosive rates. But it has a handicap: talent. Hong Kong is a nice place to live if you like cosmopolitan cities. Hainan is... nice if you like beaches and humidity. But it lacks the schools, the nightlife, and the cultural cachet of HK or Shanghai.

The "talent" question is usually where these top-down economic zones fail. You can build the airport and the office towers, but if the bankers and engineers don't want to live there, you just have a very expensive ghost town. However, the tax incentives for "urgently needed" talent are the counter-weight. In a world where Western nations are talking about wealth taxes and China's mainland tax is high, an effective 15% cap is very attractive. It might attract a specific class of mercenary expatriates and Chinese tech workers looking for a tax haven.

Explain the implications like I'm an idiot, or a precocious 5 year old:

I predict a golden age of smuggling. The "Second Line" (the border between Hainan and the mainland) is the critical point of failure. If you have a zero-tariff zone separated from a high-tariff zone by a ferry ride, the incentive wedge is enormous. Expect the "Second Line" to become a cat-and-mouse game of drone deliveries and mislabeled cargo.

Hainan is geographically closer to Hanoi than to Beijing. The marketing for the FTP explicitly positions it as a gateway to Southeast Asia. If Hainan works, it becomes the de facto capital of the South China Sea economic zone. It pulls Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines closer into China's economic gravity well, regardless of the naval disputes.

I suspect this splits the functions that used to be united in HK. It makes HK less indispensable to Beijing, which in turn makes HK more vulnerable politically. Hong Kong keeps the IPOs; Hainan takes the supply chains.

And of course, the Taiwanese elephant in the South China Sea. I get more than a whiff of "we have Taiwan at home", an effort to make a China that is less... Chinese. Perhaps a proof-of-concept that Beijing can take the boot of the neck if you unite amicably.

In a letter from exile in 1097, Su Shi wrote of Hainan: "I have no meat to eat, no medicine for my illness, no house to live in, no friends to visit, no coal for winter, no cool spring for summer. But for some reason, I've got a lot of raw fish. FeelsBadMan." (I am not sure he said any of this at all, I asked ChatGPT for cool quotes. At least Wikipedia confirms he was exiled to the area)

In 2025, you can get all of those things in Hainan, tax-free, likely imported from Australia or France. The fish, you probably want from somewhere with lower levels of mercury.

China is attempting to engineer a free market organ and transplant it into nominally communist body. The rejection risk is moderate. I, for one, am interested in seeing how it all plays out.

China has some of the best legal frameworks in the world for trade, Britain is a terrible jurisdiction for world trade.

China doesn't really care about how you conduct your affairs as long as you aren't openly provoking China. They have no issue doing business with the Taliban, questionable mining companies in Africa, Russians, or Americans. If you can pay you can do business. They don't give a toss about your ESG rating. Wearing a free Tibet shirt when going to court in China isn't advisable but neither is wearing a IRA t-shirt in England.

Hey man, I'm no expert here. All I can say with a semblance of confidence is that the Chinese seem to disagree with you. Hence the whole FTP shtick.

Perhaps they think the two systems are complementary. Or perhaps it's a massive proof of concept, albeit one with the usual amount of Chinese bloody-mindedness. They rarely half-ass these things.

You get Communism with Chinese Characteristics, something more experimental on Hainan, and maybe integration down the line when one decisively does better than the other. It's very pragmatic.

The experience of foreign companies doing business in China is not this. China absolutely uses threats to Apple's supply chain in China as a tool to influence the output of Apple TV in the US, as an example.

Or to put it another way, "Openly provoking China" sometimes includes saying things which are patriotic boilerplate in your home country.

Yeah. It's hard to make out exactly how bad, given that there's even more of a closed-door culture than the US's terrible backroom deals, on top of the language barrier. But there's very clearly a lot of explicit and implicit pressure going around, and it's not just focused on Chinese domestic or quasi-domestic policies. A lot of it's weirdly arbitrary even to the Chinese.

If a product is made in Vietnam, shipped to Hainan for "processing," and then shipped to Europe, what is its origin? If a product is made in Hainan and shipped to the US, does it get hit with the "China Tariff"?

I have heard economists begrudgingly admit that the "Made in X" system used in American law is and has long been a huge mess, and that the one positive long-term outcome they saw from the tariffs was revisiting those definitions. It seemed like a VAT-like definition could actually be tolerable (pay "China Tariff" on fraction of value added in China), but isn't a trivial change in how business is done.

AI output detected.

Sigh... It's all so tiresome....

Before the accusations of paranoia: I am highly confifent that AI output is present and found it with my brain first. But other supporting factors (not a smoking gun, just supporting evidence):

Self_made, your writingnis better than this. AI or not, I can't read this, but I read the entire essay about broken world models just fine. As a mod, I'm sure you're much more familiar with the rules than I am and wouldn't break them, but whatever AI or other peocess used here made the final essay worse in my imo.

My man, I quite literally said, in the essay itself, that I used ChatGPT for help. That is not the same as using it to write an essay!

I am not an expert on geopolitics or economics. I asked ChatGPT for help with relevant theories (I do know about the Gravity model of trade and am tangentially familiar with Acemoglu). Why? Because nobody with more expertise brought this up first in a hot minute.

Discussion of using AI in general, though not one particular circumstance: https://www.themotte.org/post/3411/a-broken-model-of-the-world/392472?context=8#context

You do realize that's in the context of an essay with no AI involvement beyond feedback? I have few qualms about disclosing it when it's actually relevant, or denying my usage. You don't have to use GPT-Zero, which is an unreliable tool at the best of times. You can just ask. The honest answer here is I ran into a very interesting article, wrote a rough draft of an essay, asked multiple models for feedback and edit passes, then did the tedious work of checking for hallucinations. This was over multiple days, and several good points noted by the AI, such as the applicability of various economic models, was probably accepted by me into the final version. As far as I can tell, there are no hallucinations, beyond quotes from poorly sourced Chinese literature that I can't read (suitably signposted and kept as a joke).

Self_made, your writingnis better than this. AI or not, I can't read this, but I read the entire essay about broken world models just fine. As a mod, I'm sure you're much more familiar with the rules than I am and wouldn't break them, but whatever AI or other peocess used here made the final essay worse in my imo.

The current moderation consensus is that the use of AI to generate all or even most of a post, particularly in an attempt to pad effort or mislead, is a clear violation of the rules. We have refrained from declaring what proportion of an essay or post must be AI written to be worthy of action. It is a ruling mainly made to dissuade spam or bad-faith actors, and using it for editing or proofreading is, as far as I'm aware, above board.

While it's very kind of you to say that you prefer 100% raw SMH, you haven't even seen the raw essay! How would you know if it's better? I don't, or I'd have posted it.

The previous essay on China was a throwaway written in the middle of the night, it lacks the spit and polish of an effortpost written over hours or days. You will see a lot of variance in my style based on how much effort I'm putting in.

Much like goods "manufactured" in Hainan, I believe I have added enough additional value to the base product to post without qualms. It is, after all, mostly mine. Or perhaps the AI added enough value to my base product. The day I throw raw ChatGPT output in here is the day I welcome public crucifixion.

My man, I quite literally said, in the essay itself, that I used ChatGPT for help. That is not the same as using it to write an essay!

And this, unfortunately, is why I now skim past your posts without reading them.

I am aware. I find it most unfortunate, since I do genuinely believe that LLMs help make my writing even stronger.

That's not the point. LLMs would make many people's writing stronger (for some value of "strong"). I'd rather read your writing, weaker or not. Now when I read you, every point you make, every turn of phrase, every word choice, I don't know if it was you or the LLM. Sure, maybe 80% to 90% of it was you. I can't know, and that makes me not care. I can prompt ChatGPT for its sparkling shiny opinions all day long.

I genuinely do not understand the intuition at play here. Let's imagine someone who has an instinctual aversion to the use of AI image gen: is using Adobe Firefly to change a single pixel with it sufficient to taint a larger painting? Two pixels? Ten? To finish the blocked-in background that the artist would have been too lazy to finish had he not had the tools at hand?

What if the artist deletes the AI pixel and reinserts one himself, with the exact same hexcode?

(It is worth noting that at one point, in the not so distant past, that even Photoshop itself was treated with similar suspicion)

Where is your threshold for "too much"? When you recognize an AI fingerprint? The problem is that once you begin suspecting it in a particular user, it is easy to imagine that there is more of it than in reality. Of course, if you have an all-or-nothing attitude, then I suppose that sounds less horrible to you than it does to me. I skew closer to a linear-no-threshold model, or perhaps one where, for the average writer, there exists an x% of AI usage that will increase overall quality as measured by multiple observers. Preferably blinded ones.

This x% can be very high for the truly average. I'm talking average Redditor. It can be very low, vanishingly so for others. Scott has mentioned that he has tried using LLMs to imitate his own style and has been consistently disappointed in the outcome.

I think, for me, the optimal amount is 1-10%. 20% is pushing it. This essay is closer to 20%. But even that 20% is closely vetted for factuality. Alas, it has not been vetted for style as hard, or else this topic wouldn't have arisen. In fact, I didn't particularly try. Performing edits to launder AI commentary as my own strikes me as dishonest.

I envision myself as the artist using the tool to finish painting that unfinished background. Sometimes, it makes something so good it's worth bringing to prominence in the foreground. The day where I can see no conceivable value-add from my own contribution is when I pack my bags as a writer. I suppose it is fortunate that I've been at it so long that there is a sizeable corpus of time stamped, archived evidence showing that I am damn good without it. That I don't need it. I still think I benefit from it, though I'm not sure I can change your mind on the topic.

After all, there are a lot of people making pure slop. I try not to ever become one of them.

Where is your threshold for "too much"?

I know it when I see it, and when I see AI writing, it's too much.

Come on, spare me the "But what about PHOTOSHOP????? What about SPELLCHECKERS????" I am not an AI newb, nor an AI-hater. But you should not be using AI to generate your words for posting here. That is my opinion, and it will remain my opinion.

After all, there are a lot of people making pure slop. I try not to ever become one of them.

Just 10%-20% slop. That's too much slop.

Come on, spare me the "But what about PHOTOSHOP????? What about SPELLCHECKERS????" I am not an AI newb, nor an AI-hater. But you should not be using AI to generate your words for posting here. That is my opinion, and it will remain my opinion.

I'm wounded that you think my argument is as unsubtle as that. What I intended to get across is that a black-or-white approach is closer to an article of fate. The real world is not made of pixels, it is made of atoms (or wave functions or...) which do not come with convenient metadata attesting to origin. Even a digital pixel can produce the same outcome, and so can the larger arrangements of pixels, regardless of whether meat or machine or meat machines placed them. I care about the image, not the brush. Eventually, knowing that there was (or wasn't) a brush will not add much information, or at least pragmatically valuable information. Just a Planck Time later (as implied by the Intermediate Value Theorem), the brush will be an active detriment. Are we there? I suspect we are oh so close.

I am powerless to change your opinion here, but know I do what I do for principled reasons and not laziness. You assume the slop will stay slop. It will be better than you, or me, sooner than is comfortable.

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There's a minor scandal in the tumblr video game sphere, because Studio Larian discussed the use of AI tools in the development pipeline. It's not clear exactly what they were using the tools for, but most critiques have interpreted it as only using AI-gen for concept art that won't even get a pixel in the final game, and they're still very unhappy with it.

((I've been trying to come together with a top-level post on the topic, but I dunno if it'll be interesting enough or if it'll be me going full Gelman Amnesia given that we have actual video game artist experts around.))

There are definitely some hysterics who can't stand AI touching anything whatsoever. And like I've said before, if you integrate AI into your work smoothly enough that we can't tell, well, we can't tell. But I think just about everyone who read @self_made_human's OP could spot the AI signature.

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That's a shame they're being shamed. One of my takeaways from GPT-4 was that it was good enough to beat a lot of video game text and dialogue. Filler content, conversation with NPC #987, and side quests? AI can jazz up things budget doesn't allow for. It should no longer be cost prohibitive to develop the 120 filler fetch quests into something slightly more meaningful and engaging. Extra flair, storytelling, or character development where there was barebones effort. Someone needs to weather the criticism, raise the bar, and get paid for it.

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That feeling comes mainly from your head, unfortunately. That is a terrible pro-CCP essay.

I am not pro-CCP in the least, and I am genuinely unsure what gave you that impression from the essay. One would assume that LLMs would be anti-CCP by default.

All I can see is that I haven't opted to vociferously lambast the CCP for past poor choices. I think everyone here knows enough about Hong Kong or Taiwan to not need a detailed explainer.

I think that the Hainan FTP is a good idea, a great one even. It represents liberalization and something closer to true free trade, which I'm all for. It is a shame that the CCP is the one enacting it, but I don't want to correct my enemies when they are trying to do something positive sum.

You misspelled longer.

You have a very uniquely identifiable writing style. Your posts are among the most memorable that I've ever read on TheMotte.

I can assure you that the LLMs make your writing weaker, not stronger.

That is high praise, thank you. I will say that the intent behind my use of LLMs was to both improve quality and maintain my distinctive style in the final output. If people are pointing out deficiencies in the latter, then I am clearly doing something wrong (by my own standards) even if the content itself is unimpeachable.

Looking back at this particular post, it's clear to me that I let the damned bots insert boilerplate and verbiage into my text that did not originate there. It is also on me for not being careful with more edit passes, by which I mean manual ones. I live and I learn.

I feel someone here has read How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Actually no! Just a natural at it. ;)

It doesn't matter AI makes me a better painter but I can't really have have said to have painted it. I find it really unfortunate you are so content to mix your thoughts in the AI's.

It doesn't matter AI makes me a better painter but I can't really have have said to have painted it.

How do you feel about photographers? Are they not allowed to take credit for their photo, given a senor put all the pixels where they are?

Or a digital artist who uses photoshop, which even pre-2022 was full of (and increasingly adding) algorithmic editing tools to streamline editing/digital art tasks that previously were done by hand?

How do you feel about photographers? Are they not allowed to take credit for their photo, given a senor put all the pixels where they are?

They can absolutely take credit for their photograph - what they can't do is call themselves painters. If self_made_human wants to call himself a prompt engineer, I'm not going to stop him.

In my opinion, self_made is a textbook narcissist who only writes to puff up his own ego. I also skim all his posts and I think it's regrettable that he's a mod here.

Criticizing his use of AI is one thing, but personal attacks are unnecessary.

Textbook narcissist? I've read the actual textbooks, and I'm afraid that I do not share your opinion. You can keep it, for what that's worth.

I won't comment on the object level question of how good the post is. I haven't read it properly either, and the spinoff question about AI-influenced content (specifically, on a discussion forum) is more interesting to me anyways.

There seems to be 2 competing ideas of the purpose of this forum:

  • A platform for human socialising, centered around serious political discussion (see e.g. your comment)
  • A place for truth-seeking (see e.g. @SecureSignal's comment)

I always just sort of assumed that truth-seeking was the primary goal of the forum (and the socialisation stuff like Wellness Wednesday kinda just happens, because we are in fact humans and not inference machines), and interpreted all the rules as acting in service to that (e.g. we get free speech, because sometimes the truth is highly offensive, etc)

But the recent discourse around AI usage seems to go against this. If this place is about human interaction, then using AI is automatically dumb, irregardless of quality, as you say downthread:

... this place is for human interaction. If you're not using your own words, what's the fucking point?

...but if we are here for truth-seeking, then it shouldn't matter if someone used AI or not, it's like retroactively deciding you don't like a dish because the chef used cumin.

As in, it still makes sense to stop reading/engaging seriously with a poster because they establish a track record of bad (irrelevant, uninformative, lies, etc) posts - but the reason should be because the actual end result is bad, not because you disapprove of the process.

Well, I can't speak for what everyone's own personal model for what the Motte should be is. However, the mission statement that's been up forever is:

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.

I would emphasize "their ideas." To me, using an LLM to pad your posts casts doubt on how much thinking you are actually engaging in or testing, or engaging with the community.

If you view the Motte as a place to find "Truth (tm)" by any means possible, well first of all, good luck. But secondly, sure, I guess at some point that purpose could be fulfilled by people just unleashing AIs to argue with each other.

but the reason should be because the actual end result is bad

See, right now I think the end result of an LLM-written post is bad. It's visibly written by an AI, and in the same way that there is some AI art that's "good" and a lot that basically serves its purpose (draws your RPG character, generates a book cover, whatever), most of it is still in the uncanny/not-quite-human/plastic and slightly "off"/overly-polished yet much of a sameness range. I feel the same way about the majority of AI writing, including smh's post. If you see it, you see it. If you don't... shrug.

My opinion is just the opinion of an angry old man, so you are free to disregard it if you wish. But I believe there is a huge massive difference between using AI for research, ideas, and brainstorming, versus using the output of an LLM in directly as part of the final product, tweaked or not. Those strings of characters which were output from an autoregressive language model will forever never be equivalent to characters created from human neuron activations resulting in keyboard buttons being pressed. No matter how much you fact check or change up the output of an LLM it remains what it fundamentally is.

What I am fairly confident of, is that some substantial portions of this essay were originally copy pasted from ChatGPT or some similar tool, and then edited, fact checked, iterated or whatever. Irregardless of the correctness and merit of the argument, it's not really something I am able to read.

You don't have to use GPT-Zero, which is an unreliable tool at the best of times. You can just ask.

I don't because I already know. The tool results are just something for the naysayers who may believe a tool more than "I said so"

The current moderation consensus is that the use of AI to generate all or even most of a post, ... It is a ruling mainly made to dissuade spam or bad-faith actors, and using it for editing or proofreading is, as far as I'm aware, above board.

Noted.

The previous essay on China was a throwaway written in the middle of the night, it lacks the spit and polish of an effortpost written over hours or days. You will see a lot of variance in my style based on how much effort I'm putting in.

Again, this is the opinion of an angry old man, but what you say is spit and polish, I can only see strings of bytes that came out of an algorithm.

I ran into a very interesting article, wrote a rough draft of an essay, asked multiple models for feedback and edit passes, then did the tedious work of checking for hallucinations. This was over multiple days, and several good points noted by the AI, such as the applicability of various economic models, was probably accepted by me into the final version.

You haven't even seen the raw essay! How would you know if it's better? I don't, or I'd have posted it.

I eagerly await the day when a user posts alongside a comment the Git repository containing all of his iterations and the LLM responses thereto.

This is something I have considered (but let's be honest, I'm too lazy to do so). Last time this happened, I went to the effort of sharing screenshots of multiple versions of my drafts in progress, which is a serious pain.

The main issue is that there is no robust way to ensure that the text presented as "human" wasn't LLM influenced in some way. Even a system that monitored raw keystrokes is vulnerable to someone simply looking at another monitor and typing in LLM text manually. It is trivial to fake the whole process if someone wants to, especially when text is usually copied in wholesale. It is also trivial to pass off AI content as entirely human written, but it requires a degree of effort that the average troll is unwilling to devote.

I'll throw in my two cents and say that prompting things like "summarize the sequence of costs tariffs impose" is fine because it can probably provide a clearer summary, and in less time, than you. Your perspective + predictions are presumably your own and not just pasting LLM opinion on the state of things.

Ultimately I learned a lot from the post relative to the time reading it, that's what I care about most.

That they are, but I must admit that I feel a lot of Stonetoss_rope.jpg at you being the person backing me up here.

With that said, I'm the safest here from that accusation because no LLM would assist writing my posts or helping my arguments haha.

True, unless you go to the bother of finding a potent jailbreak or some OSS model tuned till the safety filters fall off. Unfortunately, I seem to recall @Amadan catching you using LLMs to generate "normal" posts and thus decrease the relative density of Joo-posting.

Sigh. With friends like these, who needs enemies? I feel like PETA would, if Hitler offered to do a public endorsement of vegetarianism. A very kind and humanitarian impulse, just... A lot of other things.

No, that was just one time I made an obviously generated comment reply (not a top-level post) to make a mockery of the dumb rule that was created to target me. It was an obvious protest and not something I have seriously done in any capacity.

You having to resort to prompt generation to not Jewpost is not the defense you imagine it is.

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I feel like PETA would, if Hitler offered to do a public endorsement of vegetarianism. A very kind and humanitarian impulse, just... A lot of other things.

PETA would absolutely take him. They're that committed.

The aryan LLM remains under development I see

AGI not achieved until LLM can craft a novel antisemitic argument.

There are multiple schools of LLM opposition, with different concerns that lead to different levels of tolerance. One, which the current policy as you understand and implement it does address, is the one about effort asymmetry - "why should I read and parse a post in good faith if it was generated in a click" etc.; another, though, which I am increasingly coming around to, is more about some sort of neurolinguistic programming Lovecraftian corruption aspect, where you can see an LLM flavour to the writing style, the narrative structure, or even the underlying thought process even if the text was composed by a human using "LLM help", or perhaps just by a human who has spent too much time interacting with LLMs at all. For the latter group, "I edited it myself" may be as reassuring as "I am a human, not a pathogen" coming from a terminal plague victim shambling towards you.

I agree that it is a mistake to assume that people complaining about LLM-usage are monolithic or homogeneous.

When I object to LLM usage, I would point to aspects like:

  • Lack of effort/spam/false engagement
  • Factual inaccuracies
  • Being boring to read (less important than the first two)

At the risk of flattering myself, I think these are the "reasonable" reasons to disapprove of specific examples or LLM outputs as a whole. But I haven't made any of those mistakes, which is why I consider myself misunderstood rather than someone cheating their way into the discourse.

Well I can say that this latest post was super-boring to read -- you say that this is not so important to you, which is kind of a weird thing for somebody who wants to be a writer to say. Unless you are writing strictly for your own entertainment, in which case there seems no need to make the product public?

In any case, given that you consider a boring end product undesirable to at least a certain degree, maybe consider the extent to which the LLM's "help" with your writing was actually having the effect of making it more boring to read before "writing" any more of these pieces?

I don't think the draft would have been too exciting either, on top of lacking polish. It's a dry topic. China opened a new free trade zone. Nobody has been shot, yet. Even the Taiwan connection is tenuous.

I'm sure someone could make it exciting, that someone might not be me. I settled for accurate journalism with Chinese characteristics. Any more "spice" would have been the less palatable kind of Yellow Journalism.

In any case, given that you consider a boring end product undesirable to at least a certain degree, maybe consider the extent to which the LLM's "help" with your writing was actually having the effect of making it more boring to read before "writing" any more of these pieces?

Of course. Have I ever struck you as being not into introspection or lacking self-awareness? I have a lot of things written that I haven't shared because I think my own output or with LLM support didn't make it worthwhile.

I have seriously spent time considering that. My takeaway is that the answer is no. LLMs aren't the best at making things exciting or novel (not that they can't do it at all), so what I mostly rely on them for is to take something I think I've done well, then re-arrange, proofread and edit. Most of their suggestions go in the waste bin. Sometimes they do actually say things that make me sit up and go huh, not bad, and those are worth stealing.

You've raised a valid point, speaking generally, so I can only beg the benefit of doubt that I thought of it too.

Of course. Have I ever struck you as being not into introspection or lacking self-awareness?

Kind of? You are getting quite a lot of feedback right now that this particular writing is worse than your less-LLM-inflected (infected?) pieces, and are continuing to bluster on about how great it is.

I'm sure someone could make it exciting, that someone might not be me. I settled for accurate journalism with Chinese characteristics.

So why are you doing it? Is there some shortage of actual journalism about China that needs addressing so badly that boring prooompted longposts on the Motte are required?

You could always, like -- write about something that isn't boring?

That doesn’t seem fair. For the world’s biggest rising country and the greatest threat to the American-led world consensus to break with its own economic model and institute effectively a freeport on its own territory seems like big news.

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Kind of? You are getting quite a lot of feedback right now that this particular writing is worse than your less-LLM-inflected (infected?) pieces, and are continuing to bluster on about how great it is.

I disagree with this feedback, to some extent. That is a matter of taste as well as principle. I am usually quite more corrigible.

So why are you doing it? Is there some shortage of actual journalism about China that needs addressing so badly that boring prooompted longposts on the Motte are required?

Because this essay is less boring than the original Reuters article? Being less boring is not the same as being exciting. This one has greater than zero jokes in it.

It is, for what it's worth, not a prompted post in the standard sense. I also wanted to hear what the better informed have to say, and providing a basis for discussion makes me feel the mission is accomplished. George W. Bush approves.

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Have I ever struck you as being not into introspection or lacking self-awareness?

Must... not... make... obvious zinger...

As I said to the wizard last night while he was measuring out collateral fireball damage...

Do it.

Well I can say that this latest post was super-boring to read

Agreed. Possibly part of the problem is that low-effort top level posts are disfavored. A long boring post might be boring but at least it gives the (possibly false) impression that it required some effort.

It wasn't horribly boring, just repetitive. Whatever the LLM wrote seemingly wasn't edited thoroughly enough, so the post kept re-stating the same few points over and over again.

1:

If you process those goods there, adding just 30% value under the Free Trade Port's eligibility and supervision rules, you can sell them into mainland China with zero tariffs

2:

Under the new Hainan rules, the flow looks like this:

  • Import raw materials or components into Hainan (Tariff: 0%).
  • Do "processing" in Hainan that increases the value by 30%.
  • Ship the finished product to Shanghai (Tariff: 0%)."

3:

The 'core purpose of the Hainan FTP is what we might call the 30% Loophole

4:

The '30% value add' rule effectively turns Hainan into a giant mixing vat. You pour in global commodities, stir them with Chinese labor (which is still cost-competitive for high-skill work), and pour out a 'Hainan' product

Etc. And this is just one example.

I disagree, I don't think it was boring at all, surprisingly this was the first I've heard of China's new Free Trade experiment.

The topic is interesting enough, but you’ve been here long enough that it didn’t feel like the man’s usual writing.

Fair enough, with that I agree, it did feel slightly "off".

I find your posts really interesting (even the personal interest post that people seem to hate) but I'll go on record and say I hate the idea of mixing them with LLM output. I want to read a human's thoughts not a machine's if I want to know what ChatGTP thinks I'll ask it and I have considered ignoring everything you write because of you doin this. (though I respect you for admitting it I suspect a lot of people don't).

I agree with you that using LLM output directly in an answer should be banned, if not as a rule (not least because it’s impossible) then by mutual gentle(wo)man’s agreement of the regular commentariat.

Hong Kong seems to be doing better now, it’s fully politically pacified and the conclusion of the Jimmy Lai case marks the end of a big chapter in the city’s history. There were a lot of IPOs over the last year, it’s again the preferred listing location for a lot of regional / Sinosphere companies. The big quant shops are expanding their presence. A lot of bankers and lawyers are back from Singapore, which can never really replace what Hong Kong offers (and which has worse weather for much of the years, Hong Kong you can go walk on the peak in the morning in October and not feel like you’re hiking through a rainforest).

I’ve long considered moving there, although it would have to be for the right package and job, and I would want to at least try to learn Cantonese (mainly for my own amusement) which is notoriously difficult.

I’ve long considered moving there, although it would have to be for the right package and job, and I would want to at least try to learn Cantonese (mainly for my own amusement) which is notoriously difficult.

Courtesy of too many web novels, I'm so Chinese that the nearest Chinatown is just "Town" to me. Unfortunately, I don't have the gumption to actually learn a fourth (fifth?) language, so I hope smart glasses and earbuds with live translation continue improving at the pace they are. Hopefully the Chinese Century will have Standard American as the lingua franca.

I do agree that HK seems quiet of late. Maybe too quiet. The majority of malcontents seem to have fled to the UK, which has embraced them with open arms. It certainly feels like half their doctors work for the NHS now, which I think is a questionable decision on their parts.

My take is that HK will likely continue being the financial capital, while Hainan becomes the cooler Shenzen. Of course, I doubt the CCP will object if more finance moves to the latter and makes HK obsolete.

Is the CCP going to any particular effort to promote cantonese specifically? I would be unsurprised if they were pushing mandarin, although I haven’t seen any evidence of trying to promote it abroad(I have seen this for both French and Russian, but still YMMV).

I honestly don't know. I haven't heard of any efforts to impose Mandarin in HK, at least, which is where I'd imagine the friction would show.

Cantonese is declining due to a mix of intra-sinosphere immigration (tends to speak Mandarin), less push from education system and Hong Kong losing the media edge that it had for decades

Most Chinese speakers over 30 or so will have a bit of Cantonese just due to how dominant Hong Kong cinema and TV were across broader Chinese culture.

The official language of Hong Kong is still Cantonese and the language policy of Hong Kong hasn't changed at all since the protests. Surprisingly few things have as Kong Hong was never actually a democracy. In Guangdong everything official, local governments, school and business is all in Mandarin. The only special status Cantonese has is that broadcasts are allowed to be in Cantonese likely this was allowed because of the previous status of Hong Kong as well as the amount of media produced.

Yeah they’re not committed to aggressively stamping out Cantonese, if anything I think over the last decade there has been more of a vaguely nationalist drive to preserve Chinese culture including regional languages in a way that, in fifty years, might actually lead to the kind of thing you see in parts of Europe with declining regional languages. But for now Hong Kong is fine to keep using it.

The official languages of Hong Kong per the Basic Law agreed between Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping are English and "Chinese" with no version specified. Government documents are issued bilingually in English and standard written Chinese. This is supposed to be equally legible to speakers of any Chinese language because written Chinese is non-alphabetic, and is similar but different to the "written Cantonese" used by Hong Kongers for ordinary written communication or the Putonghua (written Mandarin) now taught in mainland schools. The government will conduct spoken business in English, Mandarin or Cantonese and all three spoken languages are taught in schools, although "written Cantonese" is not.

I don't know Shenzhen is pretty cool already. I think you're right and no matter what a lot of finance will stay in Hong Kong. Hong Kong's western financial system is a bigger draw then the judges with wigs these days. Otherwise Hong Kong is seen a bit like Japan a bit stuffy and old hat. All the cool young entrepreneurs are in Shenzhen.

Yeah vibewise I visit a couple times a year for work and whatnot. Whole vibe in HK felt way more optimistic and cheerful back half of 2025 than it otherwise has in years.

Hainan mentioned. Probably good example of how it's perceived as vacation island. https://youtube.com/watch?v=7u8TJ6QaAmI

I'm personally pretty bullish on this as a Chinamaxi who lives in the region and only a few hours flight away. Plus happy to have an excuse to finally visit Sanya

I've been following this initiative and it'll be interesting to see the result. It's worth noting that Hainan as a free trade hub has already failed once. It was the only one of the special economic zones that didn't boom up and become a major center of commerce. But this has definitely made it a unique region instead of one of many identical ones.

I think the law is less of an issue than you might think. Rule of law has increased a lot in China in recent years and even if the People's courts aren't as good as the ones wearing wings they are becoming good enough that a lot of companies are willing to accept them over the guys in wigs for the convenience of doing business directly in Shanghai or Shenzhen. The mainland is also looking a lot more stable these days, the idea of protesters burning down the Shanghai legislative building is unthinkable. Where Hong Kong really shines is finance and I don't expect that to change the Hong Kong financial system is much more western and much more integrated to global financial markets then China proper and I think the Party sees them as a useful buffer this way.

As for human capital they have done some reforms on that front as well. Many countries now have visa free travel specifically for Hainan. As well there are some new residence permits carveouts in a way that is normally not allowed in China and even quasi-immigration for overseas Chinese and talented foreigners. I'm being vague because the proposals are not yet finalized (as far as I know) but basically for many many people Hainan will be the only place in China proper they can live or do business which should drive a fair bit of talent there. China has also built up Shenzhen from a fishing village no one would want to move to, into a very desirable city so there is precedent. I also thing Chinese might just overestimate the desirability of Hainan since Chinese love it. My bosses and colleagues here are always surprised I don't want to go. it has the best beaches in China. yes, but those are still pretty mediocre but for them it's like Hawaii.

China is attempting to engineer a free market organ and transplant it into nominally communist body.

No that's what the SEZ's were this is something new.

Thank you for the information! I wasn't aware that Hainan had an SEZ before.

No that's what the SEZ's were this is something new.

Huh. It must have fallen out at some point in editing, but I did have a like going something like "Previous SEZs have allergen-tested the mainland, making the risk of rejection moderate"


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