I can’t even. Two choice bits:
Beijing’s urban design looks like something straight out of James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State”. The city is dominated by these enormous apartment complexes - blocks of 10 adjacent 30-story buildings demarcated by 8-lane roads. The government buildings follow the same pattern: huge structures divided by extremely wide boulevards. This layout seems designed partly for social control - during zero-COVID, authorities could lock down 10,000 people by simply guarding a few entrance gates. The wide roads would also make it easy to move military forces through the city.
I kept asking young people about the public intellectual landscape in China - who are their equivalents of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, and Sam Harris? The sense I got is that this kind of popular intellectual ecosystem just doesn’t exist there. Sure, there are viral Bilibili videos from professors talking about practical matters like how to manage your finances. But grand takes about what’s happening in the world and what we should do about it? Not much going on.
He also thinks chinese are held back by communism.
Typical liberal lens on China. And as per your second paragraph, the author is not exactly smart.
I am not able to relate people like this at all. Look at how objective he thinks he is. Meanwhile dude is drenched and dripping in so much ideology.
He probably thinks that China’s successes (whatever he may think those are) are the product of the capitalist elements introduced in the economy. He laments how AI startups are not getting infinite money for example.
I kept asking young people about the public intellectual landscape in China - who are their equivalents of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, and Sam Harris? The sense I got is that this kind of popular intellectual ecosystem just doesn’t exist there. Sure, there are viral Bilibili videos from professors talking about practical matters like how to manage your finances. But grand takes about what’s happening in the world and what we should do about it? Not much going on.
“In the US, we have a bunch of celebrity talking heads telling people how to think to fill the holes left by purposefully poor education and compulsively lying media, but in China, I find none of this, what a backwards country.”
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Jordan Peterson: guy who thinks having read Hero With a Thousand Faces somehow makes him competent to talk about geopolitics
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Joe Rogan: failed comedian whose funniest moment was believing Yeonmi Park’s nonsense about Korean citizens being forced to push multi-ton train cars
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Lex Friedman: never heard of him, is he some DC comics character?
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Sam Harris: what is this, 2010?
So yeah, not sure how China is going to survive.
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I kept asking young people about the public intellectual landscape in China - who are their equivalents of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, and Sam Harris?
Out of anyone he picked these “intellectuals”? 😂
He’s a podcaster too so it tells you how he sees himself.
“They’ll bulldoze a 500 year old temple to build skyscrapers”
Only 500 years old? So pretty new, then.
“I went to see the amazing Buddhist temple in the middle of Emeishan”
Oh I guess the bulldozers missed that one.
This talking point is very common among reactionaries of his ilk. I can’t articulate the broader point but what they try to say is something like people in eg. USA being able to resist losing their homes to larger projects impedes development. This is pretty insane considering poor people have their neighbouhoods gentrified everyday. But also they only view this from the angle of authoritarianism. Meaning that a more authoritarian government will be able to push people out of their homes better than a less authoritarian one. They completely gloss over the issue of how the affected are compensated.
I don’t actually know what kind of procedure China follows when relocating those in the path of large projects but it shows how weird these guys’ thinking is.
Western perspective contradicting itself again, of course. Whenever a “nail house” in China comes up on Western media people ridicule the government for just building around them, because the government and developers lacked any legal way to forcibly relocated people. You never see that in Western countries with their eminent domain laws.
Once again, reality is the opposite of the prevailing narrative.
Need a word for these “well-meaning” types who somehow ceaselessly yet unknowingly traffic in western chauvinism. They are always drawn to effective altruism and Sam Harris (pop psuedo intellectual propagandists, the “traditional intellectuals” of Gramsci), without fail, I swear.
When you talk to them at length you can eradicate any and all doubt that they are ideologically committed malicious actors that cynically prefer to masquerade as someone benevolent and intellectually curious.
At the end of the day, these types seem to genuinely lack any and all political instinct/intuition and hopelessly carry water for whatever appeal to authority that the private sector currently is broadcasting.
“useful idiots” is the closest thing I can think of but it would be nice to have something more distinct.
This guy is well meaning the way effective altruists are well meaning. He probably is one himself too.
The article implies as much.
I mean EA types are similar to people who participate in MLM schemes in a sense; there are people who are participating because they are organizing it in their favor and then there are others participating in it because they are hapless rubes who got duped. This author strikes me as the latter category of participant. And that is why I say “well-meaning”, which is increasingly more often my polite way of saying naive fool.
If I was the US President, and I wanted to win hearts and minds in China, here’s what I’d do. In every single speech where I’m talking about China, I’d make a conspicuous effort to complement Chinese people, Chinese values, and Chinese culture. I’d talk about how my Chinese staffers are the smartest and most hardworking people I’ve ever worked with (which honestly is probably true). I’d talk about how much my daughter is obsessed with ancient Chinese dresses. I’d talk about how I’m learning Mandarin in my free time, and have a live “Aw shucks” conversation in Mandarin.
These clips would go viral on Bilibili and TikTok. And they’d probably stay up because it would just be a weird thing to censor. The CCP might even think that these displays of affection aggrandize them. But in reality, showing our admiration for Chinese people and their achievements (who genuinely are fucking killing it everywhere where they’re not held down by communism), undermines the central narrative of the regime - that the West is hell bent on holding Chinese people back, that they have no respect or understanding of their culture, and that the CCP is a necessary bulwark against these imperialists.
Yes, I’m sure your typical burgerlander, who totally only hates the Chinese government and not its people, is going to give no pushback for all of these public displays of praise for China \s.
Could you imagine 😂, it would be political suicide.
Don’t worry the average yank who has a panic attack upon hearing Spanish will love this
public intellectual landscape
Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, and Sam Harris
He says this because he is one of those weird right wing tech podcasters himself. This clique needs to be gulaged asap.
