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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33841 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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I'm answering tersely because I'm expecting a permaban, as requested.

What the hell is wrong with you?

You swoop in with a sideswipe about how we're not cool enough for your attention anymore, drop your signature huge block quotes, add your own commentary which is soaking wet with the disdain dripping from your fangs, and when anyone returns serve, you escalate the hostility another notch ad nauseum!

Now you're trying to leave forever out of what seems like pure spite? Why? Did we not respond adequately to your provocations? What kind of discussion would have made you happy? "Oh yes, Ilforte, every country is incompetent and arrogant except for China. Russia is poetic and sad and bad. The US is productive and cocky and bad. Glad you brought this to our attention." @2rafa hasn't even earned a response from you, when she clearly respects you and would like to hear from you more often. You were a respected user of this forum! Alas, I can't remember what originally made me so fond of you. Like, I literally can't remember the things you would talk about before February 2022.

I hope you find a nice girl in Argentina man.

Since @Amadan had apparently deemed me not deserving of a ban yet (a bold strategy), I'll take this as an opportunity to explain myself, hopefully for the last time, in plain language.

What the hell is wrong with you? You were a respected user of this forum! Alas, I can't remember what originally made me so fond of you. Like, I literally can't remember the things you would talk about before February 2022.

It's tempting to answer «See? Nothing of value will be lost». More specifically: what made people fond of me was, I think, merely the style of my writing. I'm a talented polemicist, if I do say so myself. My prose at its best has a poetic dimension, my ESL idiosyncrasies add some cute novelty and charm, my arguments are emotionally charged and my metaphors evocative. It's as satisfying for me to write as for the reader to watch me rip into his tribal enemies. Less charitably put, I'm a content creator, a journalist, appreciated for entertaining commentary on current events. My pulpit was akin to some American comedian's show, Stewart or Colbert's, or a podcast in this era, where Fuentes runs his mouth off on the hot topic of the day, with a dash of Russian perspective that, for the reader, was a market-differentiating gimmick. But journalists aren't human beings, are they? Much less respected thinkers. Nobody needs the opinion of a journalist; his job is to affirm the opinion of the consumer. So when I deviate from the prevailing sentiment, I get insults, mockery, I'm called a naive shmuck or an enemy propagandist, and receive condescending personal advice. Ah well! Journalists come and go. It's really not worth remembering their transient blather, you're doing it right.

The thing is, for all the pride I have in my writing ability, I look down on journalists too. It's my thoughts that I am trying to share. Mainly thoughts about the evolution of civilization and communities under effects of technology, and large-scale cultural dynamics seen through the prism of archetypal events and artifacts; and the style is supposed to be a simple appetizer (which in fact often gets in the way – it's not a cultivated skill but just how I write, how I talk naturally… See – another overlong too-Russian sentence, a digression that flows well phonetically but makes the reader's eyes glaze over).
I think about this stuff because that's what had always been interesting to me, everything else being only instrumentally significant. I came here from SlateStarCodex, which – no idea if you're aware, it's been long ago – is part of the LessWrong sphere; and LessWrong, with all its rational thinking and ratfic and general discussion and weird autist sex things ephemera, had always been a wrapper for the community obsessed with problem of artificial general intelligence. Under pretty sensible and obvious assumptions, this is the most important facet of the causal backbone of reality. Now LessWrong readers had graduated into employees and CEOs of megacorps whose projects the United States Government is treating as the Hail Mary in a geopolitical competition at the end of history. So am I coming back to the core issue.

So, what would I want to be remembered for, if it were a choice? This piece about DeepSeek, from July 2024. I did some honest work. Observed the market, inspected the models, read the tech reports, and highlighted a thing that will significantly redefine the US-PRC AI race. Long before it caused the panic at Meta and imposion of their LLaMA project (and rendered the entire Western LLM open source scene obsolete). Long before R1 set fire to Nvidia's stock, and the founder going on to meet with Xi Jinping and Trump name-dropping DeepSeek as a wake-up call for the US a week after inauguration. Over a year prior to the entire Chinese tech pivoting on a dime and starting to spawn DeepSeeks, so that now even Meituan (yes the food delivery company) is contesting OpenAI at the frontier and open sourcing their work. Back then, in the summer of 2024, I said: «…confident vision, bearing fruit months later. I would like to know who's charting their course, because they're single-handedly redeeming my opinion of the Chinese AI ecosystem and frankly Chinese culture.» That someone was Liang Wenfeng. In 2025 he was on Nature 10, and the vibe was as follows: «DeepSeek has also become a symbol of a transition in the country’s reputation — from master imitators to true innovators, according to Liang and other Chinese researchers. “The shift is real, and it’s accelerating,” says Yu Wu, a researcher at DeepSeek. Now the world is eagerly awaiting the firm’s next reasoning model, R2, which is rumoured to have been delayed by issues with hardware and training data. One good bet is that Liang’s company plans to give R2 to the world for free. “We’re committed to open source forever,” says Wu.» This is representative, you can doubt me but I say quite confidently that the self-perception had already changed. Roughly a year ago I submitted a post on the deeper cultural priors and possible outcomes of this transition event, too, cheekily written in tandem with R1 to illustrate the point of its genuinely unusual cognition compared to Western LLMs of the time; it got downvoted to hell for «AI slop», earned me some warnings, so it's deleted now. A pity, I'd like to link it to show how my/R1's predictions were prescient. Instead we still have the endless rehashing of boomer takes about Chyna stealing-copying-faking, no soft power, bad media exports, counterproductive propaganda, nobody likes them etc – missing the point entirely.

Subjectively, I believe it's about as interesting as if someone in the 1970 discovered that the Soviet Union had quietly opened a Special Economic Zone in the Khabarovsk Krai and they're speedrunning to a Japan-style Neon Cyberpunk there. What does this say about the ideological competition between the Free World and the Warsaw Pact? About the assumptions we're reliant on for predicting the Communist Party's strategy and future outcomes? In the 1970, such a report would be a bombshell in the USA, I'd wager. Today, in this forum, people will create megathreads (actually fail to create a megathread, so it's just dozens of threads cluttering the main one) about some ICE dude shooting some protestor woman. Charitably that's the same logic as mine – an outlier event that may be the herald of a bigger trend or at least can serve as a focal point for a big picture discussion. That's fine, I'm simply saying the big picture is bigger than the intra-American culture war and deserves at least a fraction of attention. In fact, I believe that the current form of the culture war, with the empowerment of Trump as a Caesarist figure, the growing influence of the Tech Right, progressives losing all their cancel power, even these land grab attempts and bizarrely high American belligerence and contempt towards allied nations — is driven not just by the endogenous trend of woke fatique, but by the undercurrent of existential anxiety about the Chinese rise, not dissimilar to the Sputnik shock. The failure of the fast AGI gambit, the resilience of their economy, the authority in international organizations flowing their way, are gnawing at the roots of American confidence, some left unarticulated in the polite society – national, political, cultural, civilizational, even racial. And DeepSeek was what had put it into focus for me.

But enough about DeepSeek. The point is, I wanted to share my surprising finding about the contemporary Chinese culture in a consequential domain, seen through the keyhole of this specific open source research program.

And I don't want to claim prescience. It's not like I've always been so China-pilled. On the contrary, my predictions had been lousy and highly biased in the opposite direction, if anything; they were worse than that of our resident, less prolific China bulls like @RandomRanger. As late as in 2020, I had leaned towards modeling them as a large, superficially significant, but non-live player compared to the US, doomed specifically by cultural rigidity and myopia of the elites, a paper tiger/dragon – a theory that's still finding quite some purchase here. In my 2020 Viewpoint Focus, I've said

China is no Iraq, it has WMDs, but its position and threat (and the intent to do harm) are also vastly overstated by our local hawks. […]. It does not have a domestic semiconductor industry, and the recent sanctions on SMIC show that its position is precarious. Without semiconductors for Huawei chips, not even Great Firewall can be maintained for long (iirc they're not even fully independent on 40nm); they will come up with something, but by that point the US can, probably, male double-digit GDP increases thanks to AI – and the CCP will not have the necessary compute.

July 2022, about their first mass produced 7nm chip:

I've evaluated this as a swan song of Chinese industry. Very laudable, might prove to be a big deal, but my model of those «Chinese triumphs» is that they're on their last legs, sinking hundreds of billions into desperate attempts at getting out of the deadlock, and will end in a whimper as the US crushes them without even paying much attention and bickering over some asinine culture war topic of the week that barely parses as meaningful statements to people outside the bubble of American religion/ideology…

By September 2023, I've updated to this–

History is still likely to repeat – that is, like the Qing China during the Industrial Revolution, like the Soviet Union in the transistor era, the nation playing catch-up will once again run into trade restrictions, fail at the domestic fundamental innovation and miss out on the new technological stage; but it is not set in stone.… It leaves us in the uncomfortable situation where China as a rival superpower will plausibly have to be defeated for real, rather then just sanctioned away or allowed to bog itself down in imperialist adventurism and incompetence.

– but I still held to the idea that odds are stacked in the West's favor. Tech is one thing, culture is another. And even my knowledge of the tech progress was lacking, nevermind the culture, to say nothing of its changes. In my defense, one had to have direct exposure to intra-Chinese discourse (and then, very specific circles) to get that part right then.

To my embarrassment, even in the DeepSeek post, I've been hedging:

This might not change much. Western closed AI compute moat continues to deepen, DeepSeek/High-Flyer don't have any apparent privileged access to domestic chips, and other Chinese groups have friends in the Standing Committee and in the industry, so realistically this will be a blip on the radar of history.

My «realistically» amounted to saying they're strategically dumb and myopic and unable to capitalize on their advantages the way Americans can on their own. I've been extremely, catastrophically overrating Western exceptionalism and profoundly incurious about China, partially due to the influence of this America First community. Not blaming anyone here; mea culpa.

So for over a year I've been trying to steer the discussion so that my errors and my negative contributions were negated. All I've got is steady erosion of my reputation and, by 2026, accusations of working for the Ministry of State Security from some Canadian who, family lore aside, might know less about China than I now do.

And now this shit:

I hope you find a nice girl in Argentina man.

Thanks. Now how about you stop condescending and try to actually fucking read? How much more must I chew it for you to make it digestible?

I hope this clarifies my position somewhat.

I hope you don't leave, Dase! I've always found your posts unique and kept track of you since the Reddit days. Someone has to counter the American front and post interesting posts about geopolitics and such. I've increasingly skimmed past intra-US politics and as a European, with Trump's anti-EU turn, I've felt quite an estrangement with the American Right. Where before I had felt a sense of oneness, cheering on Trump 2 and Elon Twitter takeover, no longer having to feel like a persecuted minority, finally being able to speak my mind on the Internet.

I've also been deeply interested in DeepSeek after R1 published around last January. It tends to give me better results than Grok does when I run my questions through both chat bots, and not go unavailable due to high load like Grok sometimes does. I'm not quite as bullish on China as you appear to be, but I'm sure starting to root for them to do something while our US-led economy appears to bungle everything up, with DRAM and GPUs becoming unavailable to consumers, where it seems only Chinese manufacturing can save us from this situation where it seems that computation is going to be exclusively limited for corporations. I have faith in Western free market economies outcompeting the Chinese command economy with abundant malinvestments, like manufacturing a bunch of electric cars that now they have to find somewhere to dump to, or imposing such a strict trade surplus that you have to give countries loans to buy your goods, which it's dubious if they can ultimately repay.

My faith in Western society is kind of crumbling, though. Or more precisely our collective economies. With a k-shaped economy for haves and have-nots, we appear to have forgotten the part about the markets where we were supposed to produce goods for and employ each other? We have home ownership unavailable for new families as boomers have decided to make construction of new housing effectively illegal. Here in Finland we've managed an atrocious unemployment rate of 10,6% and 20,5%, and if you do manage to land a job, you get to enjoy the wonders of having 25% of your wage go to taxes and another 25% to fund Boomers' pensions in a giant Ponzi scheme! The left here is shrieking, blaming the right-wing government, while I think rising unemployment is a current global phenomenon. Somehow, the Western investment seems to have become oriented full-tilt into AI, apparently replacing both consumers and workers before any sign of the fabled productivity gains or even a profitable product in sight.

It makes me regret getting so excited about AI or even getting educated in CS, where I appeared to go from a hot commodity to unemployable in an instant.

I at least find your content more interesting than your style!

Nobody needs the opinion of a journalist; his job is to affirm the opinion of the consumer

Journalists are over-hated. They provide a valuable service of collecting, verifying, and disseminating raw facts like "white house staffer told me this EO is coming" or "this company is merging with that company". It's not as noble a profession as they think it is, and they are of course not perfect at it, but merely being passable at it while making frequent mistakes with significant bias is still very valuable.

...

This is also just false as factual matter. Most normal journalists, including at the NYT, are writing articles like "Major US Public Transit Systems Brace For Storm With Detours And Warnings", and even the politics ones are mostly writing articles that are accurate.

...

Yeah I do consider that lying but just as a factual matter most NYT articles don't do that. Some do! Most don't! I never claimed they never do that! But it seems to be quite difficult to report on facts that are of interest to politics without lying frequently, approximately nobody on any political side seems to do it well, and it's still useful to know the things the news reports despite that.

...

This should have been your top level post. Your China optimism is more convincing when you first trace your previous assessments and explain how you've changed your mind about China's prospects over time.

Your other post was bad, this one is better. The problem appears to be that you were trying to say the problem isn't chinese culture, it was that other people just aren't paying attention. You might not agree with that interpretation but that is definitely the message you seemed to be putting out there.

I'm of the view that nobody can get to know China when the CCP so seriously restricts organic engagement from the bottom up with top down censorship and control. The CCP does not know how to generate meaningful alliances or relationships, which implies that they are not going to be able to guide Chinese society more broadly towards cultural exchange. They just don't have the skillset.

It seems like some contrast between "our product is great! Why aren't these idiot consumers buying our microwaves?" Vs "maybe they aren't what people want."

When I responded to you I had no idea you had all this baggage as some Big Deal VIP poster. And I took the post at face value, not that you were trying to claw back previous dismissals of China (or something?).

I stand by my previous comments. But I also think you should keep posting about China if you want. I'll read your takes and be interested in your opinion. I don't really get the meltdown-coded follow up comments, and think you were happy to mock me and then got pissy when I did it back to you. Otherwise I don't think you did anything wrong and you shouldn't be looking to terminate all your engagement with the forum over a minor tiff.

You consistently conflate «culture» in the broad sense and something like «soft power/media exports/arts/presentation/aesthetics/charisma». For all the rhetorical zeal, I am trying to use the words precisely. There is a culture of business and management, a culture of warfare and diplomacy, a culture of innovation and policymaking and so on. There arguably is a certain holistic quality to the «Chinese culture» as a general style or attitude behind various Chinese ideologies, practices and behaviors. But we can sidestep the debate about essentialism and focus on specific domains. Such as the large domain of industrial productivity, or the subdomain of AI research, where we've seen an establishment of a clear template post-DeepSeek. I of course have another post in this series, on MoonshotAI that's become a paradigmatic example of a Chinese company that adopted DeepSeek's philosophy, approximated their culture. This, in turn, is embedded in the traditional Chinese culture and is not so much about competitive mimicry – DeepSeek has no credible business plan to steal and copy, Moonshot has some but had even more of it before the pivot – as about shame and virtue; the commandment to recognize your inferiority in the face of a superior man, learn and then try to measure up.

The dimensions of culture that I find interesting are consequential even if literally nobody outside of China except me pays attention. I'd go so far as to say that this idea you stubbornly return to, that Chinese culture needs to earn anyone's attention by means of virality and appeal, is characteristic of a consumerist culture where facts are only as worthy as they're entertaining, even if they can kill you or render you irrelevant.

You consistently conflate «culture» in the broad sense and something like «soft power/media exports/arts/presentation/aesthetics/charisma».

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

"a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, attitudes, and habits of the individuals in these groups"

It's not conflation. It's just what culture is. When I say French culture is baguettes, being snooty, smoking, and design agencies nobody is arguing. When I say Chinese culture is being shit at diplomacy, making high speed trains and doing propaganda stuff (and, especially, failing to communicate much of anything else about their culture) it's directly comparable.

But we can sidestep the debate about essentialism and focus on specific domains

I'm frankly not interested in that. And never was. You had an issue with me saying Chinese culture is uncharismatic. I was speaking broadly for a reason. You can go through and pick all these examples e.g. EVs, and tell me that proves I'm wrong. But I already took the trick. On the aggregate, on the whole, you know I'm right. We get Japanese culture. We get Singaporean culture. We get Russian culture. We get indian culture. Even when we don't get force fed their media every day, I can genuinely imagine the day to day of an Indian businessman. I don't love their cultural outputs, but I do feel like India has transferred their culture to the wider international audience in a way that makes me feel, to an extent, a sense of Indian culture. Same goes for the Turks, Persians, Danes or Germans. Most people will not have this sense for China or Chinese people.

A normie on the street isn't going to be talking at length about DeepSeek. I have no idea why you keep bringing this up as the critical point in all of this. It's such a bizarre line to take as a holistic defence of China.

The best summary a person on the street will give, even a well informed one, is that China makes iPhones and has a pretty evil, or something, government.

The dimensions of culture that I find interesting are consequential even if literally nobody outside of China except me pays attention.

That's my fucking point! You might be interested in it, but as I said from the start, nobody else is. This is interesting because China is an economic super power, and has 1.7bn people who nobody knows anything about. I just cannot understand what you're not getting here. How many different ways can I say it. I'm not saying China has no culture, obviously. I'm saying the fact that nobody knows about it demonstrates a serious lack of appeal.

I'd go so far as to say that this idea you stubbornly return to, that Chinese culture needs to earn anyone's attention by means of virality and appeal

No buddy. You don't get to do that. This is a terrible conversation tactic that only stupid readers will be fooled by. I am not stubbornly returning to some irrelevant point. That is my point, and you are the one who continually tries to divert the conversation away from it. You responded to me. You don't get to say I'm ponderously returning to some side point when you directly engaged with it, lost the argument immediately, and have since been trying to obfuscate everything with a mental boom laced series of posts that mostly come back to "well that doesn't prove anything!"

So olive branch recinded, I don't like this no progress back and forth, or the completely unearned air of dismissal. You should have called it when you got caught out on me not being American, because it's been downhill since then.

"a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, attitudes, and habits of the individuals in these groups"

It's not conflation. It's just what culture is.

See? You even quote it and think it supports your position. We can read the same lines and come to the opposite conclusions. I think a culture is interesting for what outcomes it produces. You think a culture is interesting for how much interest it generates. As I've told you already:

I suppose what is going on here is that, at least for the purposes of this debate, you're incapable of communicating in plain language, and it's obnoxious of you to pretend to, so I won't cooperate.

I'll charitably amend this to "we have an irreconcilable difference in understanding of words".

That is my point,

Well then all I can say is that your point is not interesting to me and has zero consequence. Enjoy imagining the daily life of an Indian businessman or something.

I'm of the view that nobody can get to know China when the CCP so seriously restricts organic engagement from the bottom up with top down censorship and control

Perhaps try talking to Chinese people? The great firewall is one way restricting Chinese from accessing google or facebook, they've got wechat and bilibili and xiaohongshu. Nothing stopping you from shitposting on XHS to see whats up there, mainlander degeneracy is pretty top tier brainrot that doesn't need translation to understand.

Its not that Japanese are any less inscrutable than Chinese, whatever caricature of the Japanese or Korean people that has been internalizes as a representative modality is almost purely inference. Talking to westerners makes it sound like Japanese offices are filled with dead overworked corporate lifers and panty vending machines while Korea is the end boss of narcissistic consumerism.

Seriously, its like none of you guys here whining about China or Chinese people actually met anyone based in the mainland. No one is obligated to talk to someone for the sake of it, but assigning population level mystique is a category error. Talk to chinese people online, they're much more retardedly normal than you think. Less nefarious intent on dominating westoids, more shitposting on shopping livestreams.

The great firewall is one way restricting Chinese from accessing google or facebook, they've got wechat and bilibili and xiaohongshu. Nothing stopping you from shitposting on XHS to see whats up there, mainlander degeneracy is pretty top tier brainrot that doesn't need translation to understand.

Can you make a basic effort to understand what I'm saying?

To put it more succinctly, China has very little cultural impact on the world. And in the few mediums that they try to, it comes off poorly.

If your answer is to log into billbill or xiaohongshu to experience chinese culture, you're making my point for me. Nobody is doing this. Normies have no idea what you're even talking about.

"Just go talk to them". I don't "just go talk to" Americans. American culture is so pervasive that I organically experience their culture daily, passively.

assigning population level mystique is a category error

I can't scroll on this forum without being blasted with "Europeans are pussies lol". I have no issue saying "chinese culture is uncharismatic" when it's a model that describes why Chinese politics, diplomacy and cultural engagement largely fails. I can say it when nobody outside of the Chinese political elite actually really know whats going on in china.

Seriously, its like none of you guys here whining about China or Chinese people actually met anyone based in the mainland.

Every one of these responses that says "actually China is good at engaging with the world, you're just too ignorant to know it" has made some incredibly poor assumptions about me. I'm not saying this because I'm not looking. I'm saying this because I'm looking and noticing.

You specifically state that the CCP restricts bottom up engagement. China may be invisible at engaging the world, in which case their shit just sucks too hard for people outside to care about (a valid take indicative of preference shaping) or the Chinese propaganda effort is just not working - which is a less valid take since it assigns intent where none reasonably exists. Chinese media isn't interested in getting money from foreigners, when theres 1.4 billion people domestically.

granted, the Chinese state DID make an attempt at engaging the world directly for awhile, and those efforts sucked shit. Confucius institutes, hypernationalist movies with weird foreign tokenism (The Great Wall, Wolf Warrior 2, probably some other crap not worth remembering) and the brief time Zhang Ziyi was let out her cage were all probably attempts to directly showcase CHINA AWESOME, to manifest failure.

Right now many China boosters are mainly antiwokes holding up the proximate enemies greatest threat as proof of the failure of their foe, not necessarily admiration for Chinese products or media. Chinese vidya and donghua has escaped the parties notice for now and is baller as fuck, but thats the domain of weebs, so obviously beyond cultured intellectuals such as ourselves.

I swear to all of you guys though on the bottom of my overweight ass, if you want to experience true China domination, go eat their supermarket sandwiches. Chinese supermarket chains on the mainland must have kidnapped the best Japanese food scientists and forced them to make unfairly good food, and it is shockingly price to quality effective. Something about supermarkets just seems indicative of Real Quality Of Life to my animal brain, and cracking the supermarket quick food aisle is what made me convinced Japan was a real country just like how the costco chicken is proof of US dominance.

Chinese media isn't interested in getting money from foreigners, when theres 1.4 billion people domestically.

Yeah businesses are notorious about their lack of interest in breaking into new markets with high disposable incomes.

All jokes aside, it's not like they don't try. They do. Sometimes successfully. But more frequently not. Which is a summary I could use for virtually all Chinese interactions outside of China.

supermarket sandwiches

I'll check them out.

Most media prioritize local first instead of hypothetical deep pocketed foreign markets. Its just the math of cultural familiarity and limited upside from investing in the tastes of foreigners: hollywood tried selling pro China stuff to break into the market and for that we got Pacific Rim Uprising, which lost domestic gross for negligible xibucks, just like Iron Man 3 or Transformers 3 failing to capture mainlanders with the power of supplicating. Similarly China or Japan also prioritize local markets first. Only Korean Hallyu really committed money to the attempt and it just helps that Koreans are already shamelessly shallow so everyone they promote is already good looking, unlike Japs who have the weird crooked teeth for their idols and weird 80s hairstyle for the guys.

Frequent failures at breaking to overseas markets is hardly unique to China, it just is thermostatically relevant because China is relevant. Organic niche successes lack state push, so they escape notice.

Though since you're mostly westerners here, I'll leave one weird tidbit for you: there is one specific niche that was being pushed state level, and to roaring success until about a month ago (maybe). The Thai Culture Ministry has been very lax with who they disburse funds to, and some money ended up flowing to Boy Love dramas, with little state invervention against this unexpected success. It is HUGE in womens circles that were starved for prettyboys eyefucking each other after China cracked down on danmsi few years ago, and I'm sure western women watch it in large but hidden numbers. The only reason asian prettyboy rotting of womens minds may be halted is because Heated Rivalry exists.

Don’t forget that it took a LONG time for Japan to register foreign interest in anime as anything more than cut-price toons for kids. The Japanese didn’t start actively factoring foreign sales into their strategy until, what, 2016? They had to be pursued quite strongly by companies like Crunchyroll before they were persuaded that piracy could be parlayed into real money.

The average westerner of the 60s-90s probably had an idea of what they thought a Japanese man was like. Hard worker, very strict workplaces, dedicated to the company, etc. Strage customs, nice furniture, small apartments. Tokyo, bright lights, (possibly??) crazy night life?

I'd say, whether that was an accurate description or not, the Japanese culture had endorsed that meme. And that helps create a cultural story that outsiders can read.

If you asked a normie what an average chinese guy is like, I just don't think you get any of that. In 10 years? 20? Yeah it's probably a different story.

My dad in the 80s could probably go out with an Italian, a Japanese, a Singaporean and have some expectations about each of them. I don't think Mr Thompson from accounting could go out with a Chinese guy, today, and have much of a head start at all.

It's weird because obviously Chinese economics have arguably caught up to the west. But they haven't exported the chinese identity. If anything, which is my main point, they've damaged chinese identity with bungled attempts to insert themselves into it.

I really appreciate how you keep tediously yelling into the void, getting mostly dismissals and accusations in return, and yet still choose to engage with people even if losing your temper at times. Not unlike most of my experiences engaging with non-Chinese (or Chinese, frustratingly) online, it’s incredibly frustrating and infuriating to never be taken seriously, but I’m naively optimistic about everything, so here we are. I hope this isn’t the last time I see you posting here. It’s of course interesting to see the progression of your takes too.

In my defense, one had to have direct exposure to intra-Chinese discourse (and then, very specific circles) to get that part right then.

On the off chance that you disappear from this forum forever, I’d really like to ask where exactly you got any exposure at all to intra-Chinese discourse even if indirect. There are discussions on Zhihu (which I’ve seen you cite before, though the platform is now nowhere near its peak), as well as on Weibo, Bilibili, etc. But those spaces are mostly surprisingly barren, especially on sensitive topics, where people have to communicate in something close to Morse code. There are very few places on Chinese social media to hear anyone with enough intellectual curiosity talking about sensitive topics. You also can’t really find good takes from overseas Chinese, or from Hong Kongers or Taiwanese, for reasons I’m sure you understand. I’ve found that frustrating as well, which is partly why I’m here. I want to see what a few gems of non-Chinese takes on China look like, even if they’re buried in a sea of noise.

It would be great if you could at least leave your methods here, in case anyone manages to overcome the activation energy and actually wants to know what’s happening in the country. Or just to satisfy my curiosity.

So when I deviate from the prevailing sentiment, I get insults, mockery, I'm called a naive shmuck or an enemy propagandist, and receive condescending personal advice.

Right. So here's the thing: expressing an unpopular opinion is not unique here, nor is getting a lot of flack for it. You started this thread by saying everyone here is too dumb and American to be worth talking to, and telling people who disagreed with you that they don't know what they're talking about. Now you're throwing an undignified tantrum because people returned the sentiment.

I'm not going to ban you unless I have to, because you are acting like a jackass here but you do have a long record of AAQCs as well. Your statement that you do not intend to change your behavior is duly noted: if you continue being a condescending jackass to everyone who disagrees with you, you will continue to accrue warnings and eventually a ban. We would prefer you didn't.

You're constantly lying and twisting my words, even in this case –

You started this thread by saying everyone here is too dumb and American to be worth talking to,

– which seriously undermines your judgement of what is or isn't undignified in my eyes.

To be precise, my words were:

I've said before that I had stopped posting here because it's a purely American Affairs Discussion community and, for a non-American, those affairs are only instrumentally interesting due to their effects elsewhere, and they become less interesting as America recedes from the world stage. The silence on the ongoing global events reinforces my impressions both of the US and of this forum. It's a pity because in terms of the culture war, it's very significant.

Do you believe you're following the spirit or at least the letter of the rules by construing this as «everyone here is too dumb and American to be worth talking to»? How's this doing on charity?

You posture as a neutral arbiter, but at the very least you are «returning the sentiment» like the rest of us.

Did you delete your post agreeing with this faggot, by the way?

You are following the pattern of every poster on here that gets a reputation as some sort of big shot, you have become a jackass that believes you're better than everyone else here because of a posting reputation from years back. Amadan is willing to give you leeway because of "a long record of AAQCs" which you feel entitles you to just be an ass and sneer at everyone. It's always amusing to see this process happen and inevitably lead to flameouts and permabans, I enjoy it immensely every single time :)

We don't appreciate the goading either. Knock it off.

I don't give a rat's ass about my reputation on this forum or any other, and this account (as well as its predecessor) is a tiny part of my online presence. For the purpose of the discussion, I'm better than my opponents for the specific reason that I've thought of more important things and thought better before making my top post 1 day ago, and can defend my position candidly, whereas they need to move goalposts, change topics and fall back on fallacies.

I am extremely tired of @Amadan's regular appeals to AAQCs and have equally regularly stated that I do not want any special treatment, indeed I consider these passages a way to undermine my current (obviously correct and fair) arguments, because it invites the assumption of some DEI quality, and this dumb sneering and psychologizing from petty status-conscious anklebiters giddy to see a «big shot» fall below their level. The whole ethos of kid gloves for the «AAQC caste» and high standards for The Rest never sat right with me, same as any other casteism and nepotism, and it's in violation of Good Governance 101:

No well-organized republic ever cancels the demerits of its citizens with their merits, but after having instituted rewards for a good deed and punishments for an evil one, and after rewarding a man for having acted well, if that same individual later acts badly it punishes him without any regard whatsoever for his good deeds. …if a citizen who has rendered some distinguished service to his city also gains the confidence that he will be able to undertake without fear of punishment some bad action, he will become in a brief time so insolent that every element of civic life will disappear.

So if my behavior merits punishment on general grounds, I publicly ask for the rules to be upheld without any unfairness and bias at least in my case. I'm just not going to petition the mods for special treatment in the other direction, in some bizarre act of performative masochism.

P.S. Personally I don't even understand the theory behind special treatment. Presumably the idea is that Quality Posters are exactly divas of the sort you think me to be, narcissists who might feel slighted by having rules applied to them fairly, and would leave, taking their Quality Contributions with them. Inasmuch as that's the case, I believe it's long term preferable to filter such Quality out, because Actually Quality Posters have both confidence and self-control to behave prosocially and accept the law with equanimity.

But I have no ambition of litigating for rule amendment this late into the game.

I for one think you should go out like a man, come back from your temporary ban, and escalate to permanent ban with a single post if you can. Show us what you're really made of, make them forget your entire "history of AAQC" instantly. Obviously post nothing legally dubious, just something so odious it makes the moderators shriek like emotionally wounded apes as they banish you forever. Preferably not just a torrent of slurs or something either, as that's just sort of cheating.

I don't think they think you can do it. I think they think they're ultimate Vulcan logic masters, and that any fuck you post that you post will maybe just get you like a week-long ban while they wait for you to either chill out or not.

But I believe in you dog, I believe you can come back and do something legendary.

No, we're not Vulcan logic masters, but fuck you posts don't wound us.

Encouraging someone else to go out in a blaze of glory because you think it would be funny to see someone who isn't you post something "legendary" enough to get permabanned is absolutely shit-stirring, though. You post nothing but worthless content like this, and you've been warned many times. You're obviously an alt created explicitly for this purpose. Tell you what: I'm giving you a week ban. Decide what you are going to do when you come back. Obviously I would prefer you actually become a worthwhile poster, but that isn't why you created this account, is it?

So if my behavior merits punishment on general grounds, I publicly ask for the rules to be upheld without any unfairness and bias at least in my case.

Fine. 1-day nap since you're just descending to namecalling and chest-puffing belligerence.

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