This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I was pleasantly surprised to read a post from you that was not just more long-winded China-boosting, but you had to go and spoil it there at the end. I used to find your posts much more interesting before you developed this fixation, tbh. Do you live in China? If you do not, I strongly recommend you move there and work there. As your Carney quote points out, it's important to "name reality." The most famous Chinese sage even has a term for this, 正名. You'll love it.
Anyway, to address your main point, I don't see any rebuttal from you about why TiltingGambit is wrong, just more of your typical sneering about how Americans are arrogant and dumb. It almost seems personal. Chinese cultural output has made great strides in the last 15 or so years (when I was in college studying Chinese, China would come out with a martial arts movie that did decently in the US and the world maybe once every few years -- usually by Hong Kong directors) but it is anemic compared to that of the U.S. Now they produce web novels that are read by gray tribe weirdos (I say this with fondness) but nearly zero normal or high status people in the west consume Chinese content. An improvement but hardly a threat to American culture hegemony.
The way I see the Euro/Canadian threats to cozy up to China is that if they are still truly Western countries, they are probably bluffing. What European nation would willingly submit to Ottoman or Mongol hegemony just to spite the Pope? Overtures, sure, symbolic gestures and treaties maybe, but never submission. If the enlightenment "globohomo" religion has mutated and innovated to such a degree that it is no longer recognizably a strain of Christianity (the soil of western civilization) but some new thing that sees both the Western Christian nation state and the Chinese civilization state as equally alien and thus roughly equivalent, then, well, the threats are probably genuine and there is probably no way to stop the break up of what was once called "western civilization."
Byzantine Egypt before the Arabs, 18th and 19th century Hungarian and Polish leadership and national heroes constantly worked with and fought for the Ottomans...
Many thousands of examples, the Hungarian ones are mostly in Hungarian only though:
More options
Context Copy link
Just to reiterate, I am definitely not American. But I think it does demonstrate the OP's mindset that he's still suspicious that I am, in fact, lying about my nationality in his response to you.
It's like somebody on twitter voicing complaints about BLM, to then be accused of being a white supremacist, and then posting proof that they're actually black. It really jiggles the narrative in an awkward way.
More options
Context Copy link
I do not care what you find interesting or not, nor do I find your attempts at psychologizing insightful. China is roughly half of effective humanity on most important metrics, so it is more rational – even for Americans, or perhaps especially for Americans – to be «obsessed» with them than with petty dramas of American social decay, like a low-IQ enforcer killing a twitchy activist or the other way around, some state-level DEI/anti-DEI regulation imbroglio, a slapfight, a shooting, a bill, a parochial religious disagreement, or any other of our usual topics. Thinking about this from first principles, American prestige is insanely inflated. At this point it's only solidly backed by the hypothetical returns on AGI.
I do not really want to debate the relative Chinese «soft power». They've made some progress; in the end, they're profoundly inferior in messaging to the US and even Japan and will continue to be inferior. I simply think it doesn't matter much, most of the goodwill America gets from other countries is based not on media exports or high-quality propaganda but on actual strategic interests and demonstrable benefits of cooperation. And American media as of now has become repetitive slop with questionable ideological payload, nobody gets inspired to defend Democracy Human Rights by Captain America, it's just (at best) neutral entertaining content, like Labubus or Funko Pops in the physical realm. Holding Funko Pop IP is not really a source of political loyalty, it's a source of Funko Pop revenue. If the ROI on continued cooperation nosedives, you still get reaction like Carney's. So my objection to TiltingGambit is just that: the US won't have «all the allies» specifically on merit of its «charismatic cultural export». It's a cute way of expressing pride in your nation's strengths but it's basically a joke, like a German saying foreigners would die for German beer and autos, or an Italian claiming there are Pasta Nationalists all over the world. (That said, he claims to not even be American, so I guess we can conclude this pride narrative also gets exported).
To have All The Allies, the US will need to continue being the version of itself that's profitable to be allied with – security guarantees, reasonable economic relations. In peacetime, this is realistic and not that expensive. For the profits to outweigh the costs of opposing Chinese industrial machine in the hypothetical WWIII, either the machine needs to be somewhat less impressive than it's shaping up to be, or America will have to be more generous than it's being under Trump. Charisma is overrated, mostly due to motivated reasoning about comparative advantages.
See, ironically, this is a pretty non-Western worldview. The whole premise of the Rules-Based International Liberal Order was that you don't have to kowtow to the strong. This is the idea China espouses, too – they constantly drone on about the UN Charter and the equality of nations. It's easy to dismiss as insincere, but how exactly is it insincere? Sure, they can punish a country for crossing their «red line» with a tariff. But weaponization of tariffs is routine now. In contrast, Trump not only tariffs at will, sometimes very pettily, making up red lines on the go, but he demands precisely submission, ritual humiliations, he will even flex it by publicly leaking private conversations where he's asked not to do just this. (Or making up the whole thing to flex before his sadistic fans, which is pathetic in its own way. But he's doubling down.)
At this stage, your argument amounts to a purely racial one. Profitably working with China in a context that gives them leverage is automatically «submission» and so «unacceptable to Western countries». Working with the US is honorable alliance between Free White Peoples, reasonable submission to the primus inter pares, even as the hegemon explicitly frames it as a hierarchy where he's the lion and you're the small dog (thus getting raped). …I guess I don't know, I'm not a Western person, maybe this whole story of the Hajnal Line anti-racism was a lie, and y'all are invested in White Supremacy enough to accept such blatant gaslighting indefinitely. Maybe that's the Soft Power, the Charisma. But I'm getting the impression that this is not the case.
You've probably missed that I propose another thesis: Americans do not belong to the Western Civilization proper. They self-identify as «Judeo-Christians», they're heavily Latin American, they have unique rites and beliefs, strengths and weaknesses, they treat «the West» as adversarially and extractively as the East, and in fact Trump thinks much better of Xi than of any European leader. It's about as distant from Europe as Islam is. The «globohomo» didn't have to mutate all that far, and this year's WEF demonstrates that Americans have been making up bizarre headcanon bullshit about the «globohomo». It can judge this wholly new civilization as alien, but Christianity would concur.
It's an indictment on Chinese culture that we can have an international community that is absolutely aghast at the US diplomatic and cultural engagement right now. But exactly zero rich, first world nations, are seriously discussing swapping alliances to China.
We have countries that are dominated by left wing groups that would rather cut off the left pinky of their first born child than build a tank instead of a solar panel. But instead of broaching the Chinese alliance conversation, they're pumping billions into their own military industrial complex.
The USA is literally in the process of threatening war with EU members and destroying NATO. This is a geopolitical conflict, ostensibly to keep China out of the sphere of influence. You cannot argue that the prevalence of alliances with the USA are all just geopolitical and divorced from cultural influence or politics when the US is positioning itself as a geopolitical threat. Chain smoking Danish politicians are sitting in the war room as I type this, very definitely not considering a formal alliance with China.
When I say nobody likes China, I'm not saying people like the USA. I'm horrified by Trump, I'm horrified by US liberals, I'm horrified by the cultural exports of the US that divide society. In an alternate timeline where Europe had not chosen managed decline, I could see the EU as a viable alternative for leadership in the international community.
But in the current timeline, we have a belligerent USA that is still the preferable ally when one looks at China. If you're unwilling to entertain why people aren't voting with their feet in a very straight forward geopolitical conversation, I don't consider you a person who is seriously interested in the questions you're asking.
The US pride narrative? Mate, I'm on record calling the American geopolitical strategy "retarded".
And their geopolitical engagement is still somehow more alluring than whatever Beijing is trying to do. If WWIII happens, the worst possible outcome, in any rational person's mind, is China winning. The boomers in Brussels know this. The China experts in Australia know this. The Indians, the Iranians, the Turks know this. If a ship gets sunk in the SCS tomorrow, the free world holds their nose and rallies under the freedom eagle in 5 minutes flat. Are you disputing that, or is your complaint that they should get to know China and swap sides?
Have you considered that the major cultural «defect» here is simply that China is not offering alliances to anyone? That they have strictly one ally, and that ally is Pakistan, which they use solely to keep India distracted? That they believe, and perhaps reasonably, that they do not need any allies or supplicants to achieve what they want? They don't even try to arm Iran. They are watching Russia and Ukraine bleed, and calmly sell weapons to both sides, and lobby for more EVs in the EU. They did not bother to loudly condemn American aggression towards Greenland, just reiterated the commitment to the UN Charter and asked to not be used as a pretext. They don't care.
NATO was not formed at the behest of smaller nations; it was a deliberate American project of expanding the US-UK alliance network in the face of the very credible and loudly proclaimed Soviet expansionism. You are talking as if China is proposing a counter-NATO security bloc a la the Warsaw Pact, and is being rejected because Wukong is an inadequate counter to Spiderman. Tell me, had the Soviets wooed the world with their high culture? Was it Rachmaninoff or Tarkovski that kept Czhechoslovakia tethered, or perhaps the Strugatsky brothers? No, it was a crude ideology and the threat of violence. During Mao's era, Chinese culture was incomparably more ghoulish and impoverished than it is now, and yet they had a far greater global reach. Maoism still finds some purchase among American intellectuals – with no input from Beijing.
What you confirm to me is that for a Westerner it's largely pointless to study China. All that expertise, just to play a glass bead game with your starting priors.
Not sure if you've studied this, but the official Chinese position on the matter of great power politics is:
Obviously the lofty rhetoric about never bullying smaller states may sound very quaint now. But the philosophy, I think, is straightforwardly upheld. They do not intend to act as a superpower no matter how strong they get. They consider it a distraction.
Yes, I am. I think the «free world» makes concerned noises, cancels some trade deals, and politely offers Trump to sort it out or whatever. The French are not going to lose their entire fleet (which they may need to defend from American aggression, as they have known for a while) in the South China Sea. Had the «free world» truly cared about preventing Chynese domination, it wouldn't have traded the recognition of Taiwanese sovereignty for the privilege of investing into the Mainland economy.
In any case, when those 49K Chinese EVs arrive to Canada, we'll see what soft power with Chinese characteristics looks like in a rich first world nation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
America is a lot like Russia. It sees itself as the defender of Europe and the bulwark of European values. Meanwhile actual Europeans see them as a bunch of borderline-savages, and as much of a threat as the are a protector.
Part of why America is being so miserly today though is that it genuinely doesn’t have much to give. It’s heavy industry is gone, and other countries have caught up enough on its technological edge that it can’t cruise by on fancy widgets. And the people are too pissed off and distrustful of their government and economy to eat the half a million deaths that a major war requires.
Old Scranton Joe was more generous with the aid to Ukraine than the Don, but he was being a lot more miserly than Europe and the American deep state wanted. He was a bit out to lunch, but his one real red-line policy position that he was cogent of and involved about was no American ground troops in Ukraine. And the delusional deep state flacks (who mostly happen to be butthurt belt exiles) hated him for it. That’s why they turfed him out in favor of Kamala, an out-of-her depth human hamburger that would do whatever the CIA told her to.
Well Russia is also clearly divergent from the «Western Civilization» the central example of which is obviously Western Europe, eg France. In the most divergent dimensions, Russians are just living the way Europeans did 200 years ago, and that's enough to be seen as basically a species of non-human vermin and infinitely more distant than the Japanese or Koreans. People are massively sensitive to morally coded deviations, but big structural differences don't necessarily register. Dealing with an «alien civilization», so long as it's at all functional, is not psychologically harder than dealing with a «wayward cousin».
I think this applied to both Americans and Russians.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
'Lieber Turk als Papst'.
Yes, and also the Franco-Ottoman alliance. But neither the Dutch nor the French actually wished to dominated by Turks. It was a classic outgroup vs fargroup dynamic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link