一些无关紧要的对话【插件0.2】

— The political questions of XJ are somewhat irrelevant. What the real dynamic is the west can be used to unite China internally. Because these are issues on which 80-90 percent of the public can agree on. The double edge sword of this strategy however is that it channels political energy into fake stuff, wasting time and energy. Much like identity politics do in the states. The issue of course is that, identity politics of any kind distract from real issues and real questions. The danger becomes that average people eventually cannot see the difference between a real position issue and a fake one.

If you ask some of the students “what are the key issues facing the US?” Yea, there’ll be a few good responses, but there will also be students who say things like micro-aggressions. It’s mixed.

— Reminds me of these "fake" questions asked by colleges, like "what do you think is the biggest problem today?"

— Exactly. They want you to connect like climate and racism. Like take one real thing, and one pseudo-science thing, and connect them.

I am not saying racism isn’t real. It’s like saying god. God is real to many and people kill because of god. So for the sake of argument, god is “real.” Racism kills people, but that doesn’t mean that racist people essentially don’t have a logical fallacy to start with. Racism starts with a “belief” that some humans are superior to others on the basis of xyz. Like others “believe” in angels.

What liberals can’t understand is, when we fight racism, it’s not like fighting climate change or a material process. We are fighting people’s personal beliefs, we are asking them to leave their “religion” and “convert” to ours. That’s the honest way of putting it. It’s all religion. And in that sense, very western.

It’s just completely unsurprising considering the history of Europe. But the interesting thing is, of course Chinese do religion, too, just in their own way. And these identity politics, some can 本土化 and morph in China, but we should be careful with this. It’s a burning fire.

— Big countries get criticized all the time. People hate Bolsanaro for cutting down the rainforest; people hate Trump for being racist; people hate the Japanese for killing whales. Every country has its problems. Part of being in the global community means taking and throwing some criticism.

Here is the sad truth. Why did the US enact the New Deal in the 1930s? Because the Soviet Union dealt with the Great Depression well. Why did the US pass civil rights in the 1960s? Because the Soviet Union constantly attacked the US for hypocrisy and they were correct, even if their intentions were not designed to improve life in the US. All of this is obvious to anyone who studies history. Foreign pressure and international reputation can be a force for positive change. The problem is that China has now been inoculated against all of that due to the limits on internal discourse and the domestic media landscape. Every “criticism” is labelled an unfair attack because the focus is on the messengers, not the message. The problem is none of that means that the message isn’t true. And if China cannot find a way to proactively engage with that, it’s hard to actually change in ways that count. That’s how countries improve.

There’s some fundamental disconnect. If Beijing wants to be number one, then the number one country always get the number one level of criticism. That’s how the world works. But I think they seem to think. Number one gets the most praise?