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IS MY CLASH WITH THEMOTTE POSTERS PURELY VALUE BASED
17 upvotes!
Now, the fascinating thing about this post is it takes my position far further than I could ever imagine doing so and then confronts me with a person who claims it would be irrelevant if this extreme position were fully true. That "unfeeling automata" might, if representing a substantial portion of your elite, convert your somewhat free country into a nightmare where you never saw an unmasked face again, seems not to bother him in the slightest.
Now I'd be tempted to ignore this as a one-off but then there's this response to my comment on foot-binding.
Now this is fascinating to me, because while I can intuitively understand the conditions leading to things like genocide, or more to the point physical child abuse, footbinding falls within the entirely alien moral universe world to me. Given the choice between an otherwise loving family who bound my feet, and an otherwise violent one that didn't I cannot possibly imagine choosing the latter. I'm pretty sure this isn't just my gender speaking for another gender, and I'm more than willing to entertain what might be considered misogynistic thinking. Yet @DaseIndustries hits me with this.
Now, I don't doubt that someone of Dase's intellectual caliber understands why the testimony of a person, victimized irreperably by loved ones, in a cultural context where this was normal; might be less than reliable. So I'm left, once again with the feeling that our underlying basic instincts must just be different in some way. How would we go about figuring out whether this is the case?
At the risk of making discussion even less substantive and more personal, I ask: are you, by any chance, like myself, a self-hating person of East Asian descent?
The only people I know who are as obsessed as you are with the particular deficiencies of the Chinese soul are myself and a small number of acquaintances, also of Chinese descent. Occasionally we will have conversations along the lines of "why do we just kind of suck?" We'll challenge our other friends to name a single courageous, empathetic, inspiring Chinese leader, and they'll come up with some names, and I'll say those are pretty weak examples, and they'll say, well how many courageous empathetic inspiring leaders of other races can you name? And I'll ask whether basic kindness is even a virtue in Chinese culture, which will elicit eyerolls. Etc.
While I am somewhat heartened by the testimonies of commenters here who insist that they have interacted with East Asians and found them all right, I remain, like you, hooked on this idea of a fundamental racial difference in disposition, even if I cannot put my finger on exactly what it is. And I'm sure I would be shot down just as you have been if I tried to make more specific claims. However, I'm less sure that this is important on a geopolitical or civilizational level. There's definitely some vibe mismatch, and sometimes vibes are superficial and sometimes not. Anyway, if you do not happen to be an undercover East Asian, I suppose I can only express my hope for general tolerance.
I will respond to you on one specific point:
Speaking only for myself, I still wear a mask sometimes for several reasons: 1) it's cold out, and a mask keeps my face warm, 2) I seem to get sick easily, 3) when I have allergies I feel more free to sneeze/throat-clear on a crowded bus if I'm wearing a mask, 4) it seems to produce some feeling of psychological safety, as with sunglasses, 5) the lower half of my face isn't especially attractive, so I'm not losing too much, 6) it might deter unwanted chitchat when I'm in a hurry, a bit like headphones. (Reasons 4-6 are more just slight benefits that counterbalance the negatives.)
No. Sorry, that would be an epic twist wouldn't it?
This one is easy, Lee Kuan Yew on all counts.
Any self hating Western oriented Chinese person, provided they are not self hating in the woke direction, gets westerner points from me. If it weren't for the mask I'd consider you an honorary Aryan, but nonetheless you can rest assured that I have no intention of doing you any harm. My concerns are about future immigration, and the rise of China the nation. As for all Asians currently in the US, I don't think they should ever suffer anything other than full legal and social equality.
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If we're going to be casually racist and speak loosely,
I get what you're talking about, the slice of Chinese pop cultural output that I've seen seems more referential and less sophisticated than what I've seen elsewhere... from Japan. For Korea and Singapore, I think they may have industrialized too quickly, and for China Communism probably damaged the novel culture-generating power that China would have had, and put it below what they could have reached. It probably also damaged the population's behavior, as it seems to have done in Russia.
I still think this vibe would be there without the Communism and if industrialization had occurred more slowly, but there might be a greater perception of comfort and a greater willingness to lean back and experiment.
The success of the Europeans since the 1500s has been a bit psychologically destabilizing for everyone.
Asians are at least on a better footing here in that they're the only ones that can really challenge the Europeans on the footing where they're most impressive - large modern industrial nation-states with sophisticated warfighting systems.
But for others, it's been so upsetting that BENs and WS envision Europeans as some sort of unstoppable psychic warrior race, and I just don't think that's an accurate characterization. If we're being loosely racist, low epistemic standards - they're the galaxy brain race, the Willy Wonka of races, high variation in ideas, and they've been making everyone else put up with their wacky ideas for the last 5 centuries, and sometimes that's been very beneficial, and other times it's been very hazardous. Asians (China especially) may have come up with similar ideas 3 millennia ago, but didn't necessarily apply the same intensity or combine them with industry. (Like, I'm surprised that it's not an Alt-Right meme that "East Asians are the Control Group.")
If people stopped feeling threatened by Europeans for 10 minutes and thought "what are these guys actually like?" they would notice that Europeans are Wonka, notice a bit more of how their ethics distributing stack works (for instance, UMC-W attacks on WWC), relax a bit, and ask themselves how they can use this to build up national wealth. In like 100-200 years, the Europeans may be seen like a Tumblr sexyman.
And to the credit of governments throughout East and Southeast Asia, many of them have shunned the "Revenge of the Third World" model in favor of peacefully building up industrial capital through exports to the United States - even Vietnam, who the United States dumped millions of tons of bombs on in living memory.
(Edit: It should go without saying, but like 90% of "whiteness" theory or "white supremacy" theory content is just the unstoppable psychic warrior race hypothesis. One has to be a bit paranoid to think that "2+2=4" is somehow "white." A lot of this stuff sounds weird because it's superstition.)
?
You know what modernity really needs? A Strong Leader, one with determination as strong as steel, who'd make usage of unexplained acronyms punishable by death. Nay, we need 50 such leaders.
Other than that little homicidal nitpick, cool post (really).
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Is your circle of acquaintances familiar with Lee Kuan Yew? He’s easily among the best national leaders in the modern era.
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Adding to zinker and others –
I respond to your threads for two reasons. A) the purported innate racial temperamental difference is an interesting problem in the context of charging demographics and the geopolitical situation, as well as in general interesting for me. And b) I have a policy of trying to make lemonade out of lemons that life gives me.
But boy do you supply rotten ones. To the point that engaging further, recasting your disingenuous rhetorical questions as a worthwhile conversation starter, is a bit of a defection against the social compact of the place – because it would be rewarding a bad actor. So best I can do is add to the dogpile a bit of didactic material for lurkers.
Rather than saying niceties about my «intellectual caliber» while glibly dismissing the argument as obviously reliant on false consciousness of Chinese women, and therefore laughably inferior to your cruel-abuse-from-family-members angle, you could seriously grapple with the proposition and check out
Bossen's work or somethingsome collection of interviews with those women. I don't even care if it validates your general impression, that's fine – just stop acting as if you have done all object level homework you had to and now can loudly muse about first principles while reiterating the same few examples that you claim imply the threat of universal masking tyranny or whatever. If you think no testimony of Chinese victims themselves is admissible, that is fine too – but argue this explicitly.Update substantively on mod calls. Mods hold dictatorial power, and aggravating them with unrepentant repeat offenses is utterly pointless. This is just a fact of life.
Respond to criticisms as if they are made in good faith, by reasonably intelligent and skeptical people who have thought about the issue. Even when you are sure they do not merit such a prior (believe me, I know how it feels) – try to reinforce your conjectures against their specific arguments. Report and move on, if you are exasperated with bad faith and low effort.
Crucially, do not treat your opponents like morons. We may pontificate and soapbox a lot, but it's not an excuse to condescend.
If you can't play by these rules, we can't help you.
For no particular reason, 'engaging with bossen's work'. Just from the article, it doesn't seem right - women doing stationary handwork, 'boring, sedentary tasks' like making fabric, is universal, so it's not clear their reluctance to do it is an issue, and foot binding is an extreme treatment for a questionable problem.
... apparently it's a 250 page book. Wasn't really interested in reading it, but ended up skimming it because the 'economic and ethnographic history of textile production' parts are pretty interesting, even though the strong claims about footbinding / textiles aren't really true. They exactingly prove that footbinding declined when mechanized textile was growing, but correlation, causation... Even if (very plausible) the decline of textile labor in favor of other more modern forms of less sedentary labor for women led to a decline in footbinding, this doesn't at all prove footbinding existed for the purpose of that labor. [what follows is more boring disagreement with bossen's claims)
From this book review,
I think they collected a bunch of data of the form 'foot binding went away as a practice when industrialization happened, foot binding traditionally happened around the same age women started producing cloth'. But the former could be explained by cultural flow from industrialized places, or industrialization generally upending old cultural practices, and the latter is probably just an uninteresting coincidence, as both happen when the person is young, and there aren't that many few-year-long age buckets during youth. They combine this with narratives about how foot binding is related to female textile work, and lots of detail about female textile work and footbinding, but no real evidence is given that the latter is even mostly a result of the former.
Again from the review
A (shorter) paper by the same authors is more of the same. Lots of general historical and economic information, information on when a shift away from manual to factory textile production happened and when foot-binding shifts happened, claims they happened at the same time, but correlation isn't causation. Paragraphs like these don't inspire confidence - they say they did it for marriage, but is that plausible? No, because old fashions don't change that easily. The reason must be something they didn't mention at all.
This seems reasonably analogous to circumcision. The somewhat unconvincing justifications, the historical tradition. This is just the way things are done. As a cut dude that isn't all that mad about it I could easily describe the practice in as dehumanizing words as you. It's a pretty fucked up thing they did for centuries and they stopped as far as I can tell, that puts them ahead of us in circumcision and in some sense slavery(is it too absurd if I decide arbitrarily to bound foot binding between these two practices?). I've spent much time in America with first and second generation Chinese people, they are as varied as any other. They understand and are unhappy about being discriminated against by affirmative action. In response to the crime wave some bought guns and I got to be present when one family who bought one was showing it and discussing the issue with another family. The second generation and onwards understands and absorbs our memes as well as any other group of kids I've known. The first generation seems to respect the idea that they've moved to a place with different values and tries to assimilate. These are our people, these are Americans. Some of them have stories reminiscent of my own ancestor's coming to this place, and they got citizenship the proper and legal way. They are ours and no one else's
i can't tell if you meant to imply i was moralizing against a chinese practice, but I was solely interested in bosen's work as anthropology / something to factcheck, as opposed to making a point about how friend or enemy the chinese are. I agree that chinese seem to have a similar set of variation in 'innate' traits that whites do, and culturally adopt values in the same way everyone does*. Plenty of stuff subgroups of white people did in ancient times was as "cruel" as footbinding.
* There probably are racial differences (aside from intelligence) in ... all sorts of things ""behaviorally"", just because individual genetic variation is plentiful, but what they are I (genuinely) have no idea what they might be, and they could be very different from the what one might guess.
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On second thought this was a poor and lazy suggestion (made after being rudely awakened by an errant delivery man and trying to fall back asleep); I've forgotten where a proper collection of interviews was, and it looked like Bossen cites some of those women after collecting thousands of interviews under the scope of the project, so I linked to the article, but really there's no reason to recommend the book itself if it doesn't provide their narratives in as raw a form as possible. If you have better suggestions, please share.
Bossen, being a cultural anthropologist, is doing the usual orthodox Marxist «social being determines consciousness» thing where unappealing cultural practices are chalked up to expressions of the preceding profit motive. Her interpretation is not as valuable as opinions of those women, specifically for purposes of commenting on the morality of the practice.
Personally I think that the Chinese really are stricter with their kids, and Chinese kids really are more tolerant of discomfort, severe discipline and obeying social demands. Sometimes the racists compare Chinese people to ants and such because of this; but if anything, overpowering inhibitory control is a particularly human trait, the hallmark of neurological maturity (there's an obvious effortpost here). Like I've suggested in my original response to @Lepidus, the «Chinese mentality» may be a product of a common evolutionary trend in complex societies that has advanced further in the Chinese than in Europeans, a trend we would do well to account for and perhaps counteract.
In any case, parents abusing and distorting children with the rational goal of providing them a higher-status future are the historical norm; and causing physical deformities to fit children into the socially approved mold is quite on par with what we're doing by confining them to schools (yes, yes the EB schtick). 10-12 of the most formative years of our lives spent in the framework where our most rewarded virtues are obedience and patience toward absurdity, our peers are mostly uncultured swine obsessed with prison-tier hierarchical competition, and our authority figures are the equivalent of power-tripping reddit jannies – and I think this is the typical school experience for an above-average kid in a non-exceptional school – is abject moral catastrophe, one that also perpetuates these evils into adulthood. This is only not seen as horror for the same reason some Chinese excuse footbinding: false consciousness and accurate recognition of good intentions behind the horror. There is no real cruelty in what is done to children.
Love can be pretty terrifying is all.
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I’m reminded of FGM in Africa, where by all accounts it’s the women doing it over the protests of men. Surely part of the explanation could be ‘male heads of household stopped their female dependents from doing this thing that they’d previously been only dimly aware of after being threatened by the government’.
I remember this being said somewhere, does anyone have the article demonstrating this to be the case?
I want to read it again and see what it said.
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As others say, this and your previous post seem to be lacking context. It looks like maybe you're worried about masking in the West? But it really didn't seem to be a bunch of East Asian officials forcing that on Westerners, but the Westerners' own leaders, of different ethnicities, largely European ancestry, and the people themselves.
There is a certain repetition of theme through some of these veiling and binding practices of various cultures, which is often tightly bound up with class and leisure. Well off people who can have food delivered and work from home mandating masks, dressing their daughters in burkas, binding their daughters' feet, loading them up with 20 lbs of neck rings, tight lacing their corsets. What's the big deal, surely you don't have to walk and work outside like peasants? Castrate your son and he'll never have to do any physical labor, he can just sing full time and be paid well for it. As others mentioned, this shows up sometimes in various times and places. Now that Western culture has become unusually permissive about (lack of) veiling, people's anxiety is coming out in things like anorexia, bulimia, cutting, dysphoria, and whatever else. Apparently humans get really neurotic and destructive when stressed about mate choice and social standing.
The best solution I've heard of is to have smaller social units that are explicitly told to be kind and understanding to each other like church communities, and have as many different small hierarchies as possible, so that everyone isn't competing for the same couple of attractive husbands/wives or the same slot at the Ivies or the same job at the New York Times or whatever, there are plenty of ways to succeed. My impression is that middle upper class Americans have been feeling the squeeze lately, writing stressed out articles about not being able to get into an elite university, wearing masks in public, and finding new and interesting gender expressions to enforce with zeal. Perhaps next year's fashion trend will be tight laced corsets.
I'm not saying that some ethnic groups don't do more stressed out status competitions than others, but calling it a foreign moral universe seems a bit much.
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In simple language your arguments suck, they are low quality independent of the quality of the evidence you bring. Or even the conclusion you reached. Which is quite the feat to accomplish to be honest.
You confuse discrete and continous relationships, you propose correlating things that literally cant be correlated as in if you plugged in those two variables in a function in any programming language it would throw a syntax error, let alone it being semantically wrong. You create chains of logic that dont hold given that the nodes in that chain are not unique/independent, literally the opposite of what constructing an airtight argument is.
If you ironed out thise kinks you wouldnt have had such a bad response but most of your argument wouldnt have remained either.
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This will be sort of speaking on the meta level on @Lepidus's comments, as I don't really have a response to this specific post. I've been in East Asia for a few months now (and not my first time visiting,) and I really love the people here. So kind, smart, organized, polite, I adore the aesthetics and so many aspects of the culture here. Being on public transit where people don't talk and just follow basic rules of etiquette is about three million times nicer than any ride on the bus or train in Europe let alone America. But I'm somewhat sympathetic to Lepidus's underlying point as well, though I don't think he's particularly good at rhetoric. What I'm specifically referring to is that I find the political and social structures of East Asia to be quite restrictive. I don't want to live under a regime that is treating me like I'm East Asian. I love visiting the area for the novelty and to experience something different from the West, but the lack of individual freedom here is hard to cope with as a relatively libertarian American person. There certainly are values that Chinese hold differently from the West and it isn't a waste of time to worry about that, given the geopolitical situation.
Agree that Lepidus's tone is combative and the posts are a bit incoherent but since no one seems to be taking his side I just thought I'd try to throw a bone out to maybe spark discussion in a different direction.
I've visited and worked a bit in China and Korea. They are nice to visit. The people are really nice to Western visitors. Korea is a beautiful country. China is dirty and polluted. I met my Chinese in-laws' children and young babies and they subjectively seemed as responsive and lively as white children. I don't know why that "Chinese babies are unresponsive" nonsense keeps coming up. It seemed wrong to my lying eyes.
I entirely agree that these countries are good to visit or work for a few weeks or months in, but I would not want to live there. Korean offices had way too much deference to managers coupled with way too much overwork and were completely thankless. Months of crunch time ending with only the top manager getting a large bonus and everyone else getting nothing. Like a reddit antiwork post but real.
Chinese work culture was actually better in terms of work life balance, but the pollution and general dirtiness is hard to take. And the sloppy half-assed attitude they have at work.
Meh - china is a big place. Pollution is a negative but not that bad honestly. I lived there for almost two decades tbk
Shanghai winter pollution was egregious. You blow your nose and it comes out with a grey-black tint. And out in the countryside they burned lots of grass and plants so it was really smokey. I cannot complain bitterly enough about the terrible air quality in winter in multiple Chinese cities.
But in summer the air was subjectively fine.
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Yeah, but that's not really racial - you'd probably find medieval europe or rome significantly more restrictivre, and Chinese that come to America become as liberal as anyone else.
What specifically about east asian social/political structures did you find 'restrictive/lack of freedom/different values'? Like, specific experiences or things you saw, it's a better discussion-starter.
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Even most people who are willing to consider differences in racial IQ or 'character' between races disagreed with your post - because it's facially wrong from either personal experience with the chinese or familiarity with chinese history, or because it's poorly argued. A bunch of psychology studies from the mid 1900s doesn't help - the replication crisis began around 2010, and the 2010 papers are immeasurably better than those of 1960. And that leads to the dismissive responses.
Nevertheless, 'values' or personal beliefs clearly played a big role - a post with similar-quality evidence on, say, a recent news story about woke doing something bad wouldn't have been downvoted as much! And at least it isn't a compilation of chinese street accident where nobody helps webms.
Foot binding isn't really more barbaric than stuff human sacrifice, artificial cranial deformation, female genital mutilation, etc. Barbaric and backwards cultural practices are pretty universal across cultures.
To be pedantic, that's around the time that we started to become aware of the problem.
Your point is very good, though: any unreplicated psychology studies from the mid-1990s have minimal evidential value.
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We don't need to figure anything out, it's clearly not just values because this post is bothersome to me on its face because it has very little context, is continuing an argument but also ignoring the argument to deflect disagreements as ad hoc or something, I'm not even sure because you're making vague insinuations here that I also can't parse even after realizing who you are and what it is you're talking about.
We don't live inside your brain and the way this was posted doesn't make that apparent. So, yes, clearly there are problems beyond just disagreeing with your values. But does this matter? Even understanding this post I'm left wondering what you're even trying to do here. Are you posting this because you want the answer? Because I'm sure you can strike a nerve and get more agitated responses than usual depending on the topic but there's clearly something more than that and it's not even the previous posts that made it clear but it's this post. Whatever drove you to make this post and to keep it so vague as if we all know about you and your arguments is probably partly the reason why people are reacting harsher than you think they should to you.
So, maybe think about why this post exists, why it needed to be made so long after those arguments have basically died, why you didn't link to any of the quotes or preface with what it is you were arguing about. And I know it's not fair because sometimes your personal overton window bugbear will bug other people immensely more than their's would you but if you want to get people to react less aggressive or dismissive toward you the first step is to be conscientious in general and avoid examples of how people phrase things as consensus building or culture warring, even if you disagree the examples you'd get from a search might just help you understand what to avoid when framing your position or just, in general, constructing something that someone else is going to read. Like I said before, we're not in your brain and we don't have your brain. But don't treat us like we're stupid even if we are.
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When I said up your game, I did not mean come back from your ban and try doing the same thing from a different angle.
Starting a brand new thread just to call out and pick fights with people who argued with you last time does not in any way convince me that you are here to test your arguments per the Motte's guiding purpose. It convinces me you are here to fight and push agendas.
I am not fooled by your faux-rhetorical question as a title, or your final question at the end of this post, or your attempts at obfuscation.
Banned for a week, though my instinct is to just skip ahead to the inevitable permaban. Stop trying to play us for fools.
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Quoth Betteridge:
No.
You are "clashing" with various motteposters because you aren't showing your work. Infant breathing studies could prove that Asian children react differently than American ones. Neat. This doesn't imply that they are extra-vulnerable to totalitarianism. Likewise, footbinding is bizarre and morally upsetting. That is insufficient to tar Asians as cruel or alien. Career statistics are not adequate to show a racial penalty to charisma. The fact that you can't name Asian musicians doesn't mean they don't exist, or that their society is creatively barren. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you consistently fail to deliver.
I think you have, in your head, assumed the conclusion. Then all that remains is to splatter enough vaguely-suggestive facts on the page that your readers come to agree. This is wrong.
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