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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.)
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.)
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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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