What makes anti China propaganda so effective is that people want to believe it.
Believing that western system is fundamentally better allows justifying all the horrors we see day to day by saying that the alternatives are even worse, and so we shouldn't even try to change anything.
Accepting that China managed to find a better path that the west is actively fighting against means having to accept that the west is on the wrong side of history. That's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people.
Cards on the table, I think chauvinism is stupid. I think someone in a position to recognise their chauvinism and renounce it, but refuse to, have to be stupid. I don’t believe that the average person is inherently stupid, nor that idealism is an approach more in-line with human nature than materialism.
That’s all conjecture, admittedly, I’m basing this on the fact that huge swathes of a bunch of countries were taught and embraced materialism. This doesn’t make them correct in every issue or anything, but the comprehension that thing aren’t the way they are because they were meant to be, rather that they’re in a flux, a state of constant change, is the most crucial step in this. From this conjecture, which I can’t show to be true yet believe anyway, it follows that people of priviledge aren’t making a choice at all, they’re using the only tool they’ve got to come to a piss poor conclusion.
I also believe that by computing a sufficient number of schrödinger’s equations constantly we could predict literally anything, but that might just mean my brain’s a bit mush.
Yeah, I’m not sure if I fully agree with the author here on all of it but he definitely raises a lot of good points, and I think his “strategic consequences” section is worth consideration. At the very least, I think the strategy he lays out is more likely to be productive than castigating liberals for being wrong. Not that castigating liberals isn’t fun and not that it doesn’t have its uses but it’s not likely to change the mind of the target, but I’ve also seen strong arguments made that investing significant effort in attempting to win over what the author refers to as the “bourgeois proletariat” is a fool’s errand anyway.
Cards on the table, I think chauvinism is stupid. I think someone in a position to recognise their chauvinism and renounce it, but refuse to, have to be stupid. I don’t believe that the average person is inherently stupid, nor that idealism is an approach more in-line with human nature than materialism.
That’s all conjecture, admittedly, I’m basing this on the fact that huge swathes of a bunch of countries were taught and embraced materialism. This doesn’t make them correct in every issue or anything, but the comprehension that thing aren’t the way they are because they were meant to be, rather that they’re in a flux, a state of constant change, is the most crucial step in this. From this conjecture, which I can’t show to be true yet believe anyway, it follows that people of priviledge aren’t making a choice at all, they’re using the only tool they’ve got to come to a piss poor conclusion.
I also believe that by computing a sufficient number of schrödinger’s equations constantly we could predict literally anything, but that might just mean my brain’s a bit mush.
Yeah, I’m not sure if I fully agree with the author here on all of it but he definitely raises a lot of good points, and I think his “strategic consequences” section is worth consideration. At the very least, I think the strategy he lays out is more likely to be productive than castigating liberals for being wrong. Not that castigating liberals isn’t fun and not that it doesn’t have its uses but it’s not likely to change the mind of the target, but I’ve also seen strong arguments made that investing significant effort in attempting to win over what the author refers to as the “bourgeois proletariat” is a fool’s errand anyway.