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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| pietillidie wrote: | ^What are you all worried about? Abbott and Bishop will negotiate a shot-less treaty with the small price of sending your children to the salt mines of Outer Mongolia! And, much like the damage to healthcare and education being wrought by Abbott, many will just cheer it on, claiming it will teach some bizarre lesson in needless suffering to their kids (i.e., reduce their tax).
On a serious note, the US and large multinationals have been the driving force behind these types of clauses the world over; look at the other trade deals before going into a Sinophobic panic.
The point that Keating would make is that China has to succeed; the bits and pieces on the way are distractions. Does anyone think the future looks bright if they don't? There is no bright world future without a successful China. This is why Abbott's rejection of China's development bank was, as Keating said, the biggest failure of his foreign policy to date.
We have to get it into our heads: China simply has to succeed.
And do you lot know the difference between diachronic and synchronic analysis? Big words for basic ideas, I know, but basic ideas people conveniently forget when discussing China. Obsessing over present, static phenomena won't get you anywhere but some dumb Anglo-Americano-Euro-centric bigotry when assessing China. It's a bit like repeating the tautology that the best is better than the rest.
But from the lived, felt Sitz im leben of the Other, moving forward even from an underwhelming starting point often feels better than billionaires feel when moving backwards; this is trivial human psychology on display all around us in life. So going into a moral panic over China not meeting the best standards history and geography have to offer is to impose extraordinarily wankerish concerns on people with very different subjective lives and aspirations.
IMO, if you can't map, describe and quantify the difference in human development over time in China post 1980, you've got nothing meaningful to say on the topic. There is no ex nihilo democracy and we all know it; the very notion is a racist mischief dreamed up to hold others to higher standards than ourselves. It's the same kind of mischief Libertarians use when they want to pretend the current wealth distribution in society was handed down by Jesus himself and is thus not open to question: That is to say, a deceitful load of crap invented to justify the random fortune of being in the right place at the right time in history, and to condemn everyone else who finds themselves in a different spot in life.
Why people keep peddling this deceit—this outright, misleading racist BS—when it comes to China is beyond me.
On the other hand, tell us how things are progressing in China and we can have a sincere conversation. Tell us they're going backward, and even I will be gravely worried. But if you've got nothing to say on directionality and basic human psychology you've got nothing worthwhile to say on China except detached, autistic Internet nonsense. |
We've rejected such ISDS provisions in FTAs with the United States in the past, and other countries are doing the same. That's a move that I would have thought you'd be quite supportive of. Are you saying we shouldn't be concerned about this arrangement?
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^I am supportive of it. But that is an old problem that has nothing to do with the present China-oriented hysteria. Japanese companies will now be able to do the very same thing; so where's the Japan hysteria?
Yes, Abbott slimed this through for the G20, meanwhile (mercifully) getting shafted by China on its secret emissions deal with the US, and no doubt hemmed in by this provision. I agree.
But focus your attention on Abbott's failed negotiations, not on demonising China for successfully outmanoeuvering Abbott and his band of fawners and crawlers. It's a bad provision regardless of which country, as you and I agree.
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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Okay, I concede that I wasn't aware we already allowed Japanese companies the same arrangement. Obviously, I oppose that as well. But allowing Chinese state-owned enterprises the ability to change Australian law strikes fear into my heart on another level entirely.
Actually, the double standard you see with Japan should be a hint that this has nothing to do with racism. It has everything to do with a) the peculiarities of the Chinese system of government and b) China's (growing) dominance in the region.
I find these poststructuralist musings—"well, what's a country anyway?"; "what's democracy?"—unsatisfying and distracting. Chinese authoritarianism is not some fantasy invented by Big Capital (although, granted, they have milked it for all it's worth), and my concerns about it are not a failure on my part to appreciate 'myths' about nation states. Chinese authoritarianism is no esoteric myth to jailed dissidents, or to oppressed minority groups, or to the student protestors in Hong Kong marching for a transparent democratic process. I do not want that kind of authoritarianism in Australia, now or ever.
And neither do I want these concerns to be waved away with Putinesque minimisations about "yeah, but look what the USA did".
Of course, I share your presumed frustration with the fact that threads like this turn so quickly into fantasies about military invasion and glorious defence of the nation. These responses keep missing the point: the prospect of actual Chinese invasion of Australia is very, very low. What is far more possible, and not much less terrifying, is that our current and future governments are setting us on the path towards seamlessly transitioning into a client state of China. Dependency has a price, and it's one that Big Capital (and the political parties it sponsors) are more than willing to pay.
This free trade agreement is a step in that direction. It doesn't seem that far-fetched; we've been a client state of the US for decades, after all. We can cross our fingers and hope that China liberalises in ten or twenty years time, but what if they don't? Our data retention scheme is sure going to come in handy then.
Edit: This seems to suggest that you're at least partially wrong about Japan. The ISDS is only going to come into effect there as a result of this deal with China:
http://www.theage.com.au/business/chinese-corporations-allowed-to-sue-australian-government-under-free-trade-agreement-20141118-11p9lz.html
| Quote: | | Ms Tienhaara said Australia would now also have to revisit its trade agreement with Japan because that deal stipulated that if an ISDS mechanism was included in an FTA with China then it would like to have one in its FTA with Australia too. |
Also:
| Quote: | But Dr Patricia Ranald, the Coordinator of the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (AFTINET), said on Monday that the text of the agreement remained secret and the details could therefor not be scrutinised.
Ms Ranald said the full text of the agreement ought to be released for public and parliamentary scrutiny before it was signed next year.
"We could face a scenario where Chinese investors could sue local, state or federal governments for damages over a change in environmental or other regulation," Dr Ranald said.
"We have also opposed this provision in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement with the US, Japan and nine other Pacific Rim countries, because ISDS is clearly against the national interest."
Craig Emerson said the mechanism would give superior legal rights to multinational corporations to sue the Australian government.
"The detail has not been provided to show what are the protections or carve-outs for the Australian government [from foreign corporations]," he said.
"It means, effectively, that the Abbott government will have to include an ISDS mechanism in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement with the US," he said. |
Abbott has really screwed us over big time here.
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | Actually, the double standard you see with Japan should be a hint that this has nothing to do with racism. It has everything to do with a) the peculiarities of the Chinese system of government and b) China's (growing) dominance in the region.
I find these poststructuralist musings—"well, what's a country anyway?"; "what's democracy?"—unsatisfying and distracting. Chinese authoritarianism is not some fantasy invented by Big Capital (although, granted, it has been exploited), and my concerns about it are not a failure on my part to appreciate 'myths' about nation states. Chinese authoritarianism is no esoteric myth to jailed dissidents, or to oppressed minority groups, or to the student protestors in Hong Kong marching for a transparent democratic process. I do not want that kind of authoritarianism in Australia, now or ever.
Of course, I share your presumed frustration with the fact that threads like this turn so quickly into fantasies about military invasion and glorious defence of the nation. These responses keep missing the point: the prospect of actual Chinese invasion of Australia is very, very low. What is far more possible, and not much less terrifying, is that our current and future governments are setting us on the path towards seamlessly transitioning into a client state of China. This free trade agreement is a step in that direction. It doesn't seem that far-fetched; we've been a client state of the US for decades, after all. |
Not convinced on a lot of that.
First, you're conflating issues. "Countries" are meaningless entities unless you define what you mean by "country". If you say "the Chinese are..." you're talking made up rubbish. If you say "the Chinese elite led by X and Y and backed by Z military faction are a threat because..." you're heading towards saying something more analytically respectable, even if it turns out to be incorrect. And, as I say, if you can't put any of that in historical context you're playing silly buggers because China ten minutes from now could look a very different place. You can't use a straw man version of poststructuralism as a veil for simply not knowing enough about your subject of analysis; China is an astonishingly complex entity.
Give us some numbers on China since 1980 so we can calculate if your fears bear a relationship with reality or not. I mean, to become this encompassing colonial force means China has to subsume a heck of a lot of power currently vested in multinational capital and companies; is that even close to happening?
On racism, the acceptance of a compliant Japan over a recalcitrant China tells you nothing because Japan is not perceived to be a threat. Racism is turbocharged by two things: competition and/or threat. Do you think Japan would hold its preferred status for one second if it began to be perceived as a threat or rival? The racist fury would take all of half second to be unleashed.
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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The point remains the same on the China clause; do you think the focus would ever have been on "big, bad Japan"? Even if Japan had have been granted that outright the complaints would've been muffled at best.
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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But it's surely pretty obvious why that might be the case: Japan's system of government is seen as less inherently hostile to our ongoing autonomy. Now, is that a 'racist' (!?) misapprehension, or does it have some basis in fact?
Consider the following:
a) China, not Japan, is the regional superpower.
b) China's government, in its present form, is considerably more authoritarian than Japan's.
c) China is pursuing an increasingly aggressive expansionist foreign policy in Africa and elsewhere, much as the US have done around the world for decades.
Unless you can demonstrate that one or all of those statements are false, then some level of paranoia seems like a no-brainer. Clearly, our resources are currently useful to China (at least at the moment); why not our political compliance?
| pietillidie wrote: | | On racism, the acceptance of a compliant Japan over a recalcitrant China tells you nothing because Japan is not perceived to be a threat. Racism is turbocharged by two things: competition and/or threat. Do you think Japan would hold its preferred status for one second if it began to be perceived as a threat or rival? The racist fury would take all of half second to be unleashed. |
This is my point, more or less.
Direct question: do you think my position on this is racist?
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Mugwump wrote: | | As one looks through history, it seems to me that humans do have a sense of "the good." It seems far less clear to me that this is innate in any directional sense. The Nazis are a little obvious as a reference point, but they do make useful shorthand for a generalised human capacity for evil. One of the interesting, if revolting, things about Himmler and Co was their apparent conviction that they were doing moral work in ridding the earth of untermenschen. If they had not been defeated in 1945 (and there was no inevitability about that), then their Neitzschean morality might be the morality of much of Western Europe today. It is not too difficult to suppose that the course of history across most of the world might have been permanently altered in such an event. |
I'm just going to chime in on this part. I'm on the side of the argument that Humans do have an innate sense of morality. Funny how such similar moral ethics have pervaded across so many totally different cultures.
What the Nazi's demonstrated was the human ability to rationalise away from morality. The white western society rationalised that blacks and natives were a lesser or sub species and therefore it was OK to go out and capture and enslave Africans, etc etc. Think how colonists acted, none of it was deliberate cruelty it was rationalising.
So even if a few people at the top of the Nazi pyramid actually believed what they peddled about Jews, and allowing for the minority of psychopaths who actually enjoyed what they did, I'd suggest the majority just went along with it and rationalised it in their own minds to make it easier to do. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Agree with that, Stui.
The form of that rationalisation is then determined by the pool of ideas laying around at the time, and shaped by whatever forces are pushing and pulling on the individual and society.
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| What's that got to do with Constructivism wouldn't confuse the ability to imagine pink hippos on flying carpets with a stable universal phenomenon such as a notion of good ? ". " |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | But it's surely pretty obvious why that might be the case: Japan's system of government is seen as less inherently hostile to our ongoing autonomy. Now, is that a 'racist' (!?) misapprehension, or does it have some basis in fact?
Consider the following:
a) China, not Japan, is the regional superpower.
b) China's government, in its present form, is considerably more authoritarian than Japan's.
c) China is pursuing an increasingly aggressive expansionist foreign policy in Africa and elsewhere, much as the US have done around the world for decades.
Unless you can demonstrate that one or all of those statements are false, then some level of paranoia seems like a no-brainer. Clearly, our resources are currently useful to China (at least at the moment); why not our political compliance?
| pietillidie wrote: | | On racism, the acceptance of a compliant Japan over a recalcitrant China tells you nothing because Japan is not perceived to be a threat. Racism is turbocharged by two things: competition and/or threat. Do you think Japan would hold its preferred status for one second if it began to be perceived as a threat or rival? The racist fury would take all of half second to be unleashed. |
This is my point, more or less.
Direct question: do you think my position on this is racist? |
It's not really your point. You're claiming the equivalent of the following: People with anger issues always walk around angry.
The general Yellow Peril fear, combined with ongoing media brainwashing of China's irrepressible power, and the inability of the US to push China around on our behalf as a sort of proxy confirmation of that, means racist tendencies are primed for the China threat. But that racism could very quickly be directed at Arab-Muslims, Russians, boat people, Aborigines, Sudanese youths, etc. Racism is driven by compulsions that require directionality, while directionality travels most easily through primed brain pathways. Meanwhile, the Japan threat as a specific form of the Yellow Peril discourse died out with our grandparents' generation, but that doesn't mean it would take long to prime up the old pathways or create new ones.
As for you personally, perhaps you're unaware of your bias in this regard. (Your bias has become evident in spots in regard to Ukraine and Russia, which is understandable much like my Korea bias, but you might want to find out more about what holds Russian culture together). As an example, Libertarians forever and a day use terms like "reward people for their effort" when they really mean "block competition from poor people of colour who ought to stay where they are and never be given an equal chance to compete". You're putting a monumental burden on yourself if you think you don't have biases which corner you into making unfair judgements.
That is, are you sure when you refer to "China" (or, if you're honest: "Some vague, giant media entity I know only slightly more about than the Moons of Jupiter"), you're not filling in your knowledge gaps with bias? What else do you think you might be filling them in with?
Now, in your case I doubt that filler is likely to have a strong racially-directed compulsion. There is some evidence that parts of it are filled in with fairly cliched Orwellian text such as "oppressive systems of control". Regardless of whether or not that's true, the salient point is if you can't account for what you're using to fill in the gaps between the few dots you know about China, how can you be sure you're being at all fair and reasonable? Moreover, the subconscious has plenty of other nasties at hand, so it need not be racist to be an irrational compulsion of some kind.
So, I say this to challenge you because your views on China, much like everyone's views on Iraq and Afghanistan back in those days, seem far too certain for my liking. Do what you like, obviously, but at this stage of the game I'd much rather see you collect a serious set of facts, experience and formulations before pontificating on China.
The obvious retort to me concerns my biases concerning "the elite" and "capital". And in reply I can say I am onto that and busily trying to formulate a more sophisticated view of that kind of power. It's not easy, though, because the capital incentive to destructive and oppressive behaviour seems to be a particularly stubborn and pervasive one.
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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(Note: the following post has been exempted from Godwin's Law under Section 38C of the "Godwin's Law is Stupid" Act.)
| pietillidie wrote: | | So, I say this to challenge you because your views on China, much like everyone's views on Iraq and Afghanistan back in those days, seem far too certain for my liking. Do what you like, obviously, but at this stage of the game I'd much rather see you collect a serious set of facts, experience and formulations before pontificating on the topic. |
I think that's an entirely reasonable response, and you're quite right: I am no authority on Chinese politics, and given my interests and reading ability, I really ought to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the topic. On a personal level, I have no excuses. But, then again, I never said I was an authority on the subject, and I doubt any reasonable person could imagine otherwise from reading my posts. I think if you were to compare my knowledge on the subject to that of the general layperson, you'd consider it to be at least fairly average (perhaps better than average).
The more I think about this, the more I think that this is a reflection of most general knowledge about international affairs. And that applies in crisis situations as well as peacetime.
It's not that people are complete morons. If you consider what the average person here (or me) knows about Sweden, or Japan, or North Korea, or the United States, you could probably fit it onto a postage stamp-sized pamphlet of basic facts and stereotypes filtered through mainstream Western media reports. And yet, that doesn't prevent me from holding relatively sophisticated layperson views on, say, the merits of Scandinavian social democracy as opposed to Iranian theocracy or American small government capitalism. That's enough to influence what party I vote for at the polling booth every three years, and it's also enough for me to consider the Swedish 'model' more than a little preferable to its North Korean counterpart.
It strikes me that, in the mid to late 1930s, the vast majority of the (say) British population had a pretty basic understanding of Naziism that could have been whittled down to nationalism, racial supremacy, book burning, no free elections, persecution of Jews and one or two other things. Barely enough for a cartoon propaganda film; and yet, wasn't it enough? Would you have really wanted that 80% or 90% to have been sufficiently ambivalent about Nazi expansionism to vote for non-intervention? Or to shrug their shoulders at the emergence of Oswald Mosley as someone proposing just another system that they lacked the expertise to critique?
I ask all this because, while I acknowledge my potential biases and prejudices, I know enough about Chinese laws regarding freedom of reportage, speech, information, political dissent and protest—all issues close to my heart, as you know—to be seriously concerned about our growing economic dependency on the country and what that might mean for our future freedoms and political autonomy. That's not a view founded in expertise or academic research, but it is one based on certain (filtered) information.
One of the great things about discussion boards like this is that we can exchange views (no matter how ignorant or prejudiced). That's part of the learning process, and it can be a great way of clearing up myths and misconceptions. That being so, as you're someone who probably knows more about China than most on here, do you think my fears are at all justified? Which of my basic impressions are incorrect or exaggerated? Why not use this thread as a means of educating me and others?
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | | One of the great things about discussion boards like this is that we can exchange views (no matter how ignorant or prejudiced). That's part of the learning process, and it can be a great way of clearing up myths and misconceptions. That being so, as you're someone who probably knows more about China than most on here, do you think my fears are at all justified? Which of my basic impressions are incorrect or exaggerated? Why not use this thread as a means of educating me and others? |
The reason is because I don't know enough myself, despite thinking I can sense the right questions to ask given my experience and training in these things.
Hence you will find most of my comments are related to dismantling other people's arbitrary guesses, rather than giving concrete answers. For instance, one thing I do know for certain is that, if you want to understand an Asian culture, the very last thing you bother looking at is the legal system. And that's what you've based most of your China analysis on! So you're on the wrong planet with Asia to start with 
To give you a trivial example, there is no law which facilitates the pushing, slapping and spitting on of police officers for being younger and of inferior lineage, but rest assured in reality this is frequently tolerated, much to the horror of Westerners looking on!
There are all manner of notions within developing countries that are years away from being formerly codified in law. And many of them, such as those relating to face or suffering or apology, frequently act as a wedge against power, greed and corruption. And this stands to reason when you live in a dynamic and unstable environment where no one is quite sure where the culture and therefore legal cards will eventually fall.
Take another example; development experts rightly realise that bribery in many cultures is too endemic to treat as an individual crime. And every time it is treated as such, we always know the bigger crime was someone using the prosecutor's office to target a rival! So, the application of what from your vantage point looks like a reasonable law is actually corrupt and unreasonable in local context! Why? Because there is no cultural consensus on favours and bribes to support such legislation. And there is no cultural consensus not because the entire culture is composed of lesser humans as cultural bigots would have you believe, but because the value of looking after your kin group, and then geographic group and whatever other association takes moral precedence over fair play.
So, where you look at China and see a set of laws, I look at China and see an extremely complex lived reality involving all manner of old and new ideas and beliefs and power centres mixed in with the everyday hopes and aspirations of everyday people.
Now, while I myself am only in the early stages of understanding what these things mean in the case of China, I know enough to bite my tongue and to not make hasty surface judgments. (After making enough dumb, premature judgments when living in another culture, you soon learn it's wise to bite your tongue until you have more information).
It's not that you may not be right, but that you're obviously guessing based on what are useless heuristics at that scale of complexity. And don't start me on Russia! I've probably met and conversed with hundreds of Russians in Seoul over the last decade or so, and to this day I'm still baffled by what it means for someone to be "Russian". So the last thing I would presume to do is think I know what's really happening there, and how the whole things holds together, newspaper reports of corruption, thugs and homophobic gangs notwithstanding.
The best thing you can take away from the self critique the poststructuralists demand of you is that you don't have to have definitive answers about everything. To think otherwise is an extraordinarily unsophisticated Hegelian way of learning: Simpleton thesis > Obvious antithesis > Even more obvious synthesis. All the way along people are claiming they're right to the death, meanwhile knowing they're wrong. I mean, WTF? This is not the Socratic method whatsoever; it's just the worst of Hegel. Every book you read these days is trapped in the same dumb process, so much so that you can guess the conclusion and counterargument before you even start.
Who the heck told people that was an intelligent way of investigating the world?
All such an approach does is leave "right" to whoever has enough "might" to enforce their dumb position. But how about uttering the words, "I don't know" a little more often and having the knackers to be called a "Nazi sympathiser" by the usual warmongering head cases? You could tell quite clearly in the Iraq debates people imagined supporting war based on ridiculous moon shot claims, even if the risk was utter chaos, was preferable to being called a Saddam Hussein or Al Qaeda sympathiser. Blockheads like the late Hitchens used to bully people with that claim even though he was the idiot who ended up promoting mass death and carnage.
For instance, on your Germany analogy, I'm not sure what makes you so confident people had enough information; that sounds like a received rather than a researched idea. If people are hopelessly ignorant today, just imagine how ignorant they'd have been in the 1940s. Just look at how cringeworthy and dumb war propaganda from that period looks today! People apparently would've believed anything flashed before them on a screen.
Not to mention, you can't take simple binary scenarios and invest what in retrospect seems to be a fortunate decision with the power of rational insight. When some historical menace invades a regional country, and you know little else about the scenario, you're really only deciding by flipping an emotional coin, following the persuasion of authority, or finding comfort in authority by clinging to its coattails.
So, neoconservative effwits can call me a "China sympathiser" if they want, because I don't even know what the term means. Instead, what I aspire to be, is someone who doesn't hold views that impact other people's lives negatively, particularly if those views lack serious evidence and insight, are riddled with contradictions and hysterical guesswork, and are laced with more than a few vials of racist, dehumanising poison.
From what I can tell—and this is me taking a position—the greatest threat to us all is nationalism. If you want to get the b'jeesus scared out of you, get yourself in the midst of a nationalist protest anywhere in the world. The best thing you or anyone can do to help ensure Chinese people prosper and succeed is to start confronting nationalism in all its forms. That means Anglo-Americano-Euro nationalism, or any gross nationalism wherever you find it (as you do already in Oz).
Nationalism is the brain-eating zombie that is most likely to turn China, the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia or wherever the hell into violent menaces. As I say, in my analysis of Asia, helping minimise nation and maximise an outward internationalism is the best thing we could ever do for the region and everyday people therein. But that process starts at home first.
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| pietillidie wrote: | | For instance, on your Germany analogy, I'm not sure what makes you so confident people had enough information; that sounds like a received rather than a researched idea. If people are hopelessly ignorant today, just imagine how ignorant they'd have been in the 1940s. Just look at how cringeworthy and dumb war propaganda from that period looks today! People apparently would've believed anything flashed before them on a screen. |
And yet, isn't this kind of ignorance the stuff that critical mass is made of? It's the difference between us voting ourselves into a North Korea or a progressive technocracy. We need such simplistic views in order for society to function.
While I also value humility—as you say, it is vital that we allow ourselves from time to time to say "I don't know"—we can't lose sight of the fact that there are a good many people out there who are considerably less knowledgeable and endlessly willing to speak their kind. This is why it's important for me to see public debate as a process of argument and counterargument, assertion and correction, as opposed to hesitance and self-censorship (or worse still, censorship of others).
I'm not sure why you say this Hegelian method of arguing leads to a "might makes right" conclusion. I would have thought encouraging the more thoughtful non-specialists to hold their peace until they've done field work is even more likely to lead to that scenario. Surely, after all, this would stop us from passing comment on 90% of the topics we're interested in, while Jacqui Lambie proceeds to regale us with her curious interpretation of Sharia Law. That sounds disastrous to me.
Speaking of Lambie, this is neither here nor there, but I've noticed a trend over the last decade of conservatives (particularly on the far right) beginning to embrace China and Russia. It's obvious why they approve of Putin's regime—even those still obsessed with Cold War rivalries probably masturbate to his economic policy when they know no-one's looking—but the appeal of China seems slightly less obvious. What I do know is that I'll never forget my former One Nation-voting Dad telling me last year that he considers the modern Chinese model (or, at least, his impression of it) to be the ideal form of what a society should be. Authoritarian capitalism seems to tickle his fancy. Just an anecdote, but just shows how strange the human mind can be.
There's much more to your post to respond to, but I have to go to work. 
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | | I'm not sure why you say this Hegelian method of arguing leads to a "might makes right" conclusion. |
It's doing the exact opposite of what you think. It's now so cliched and predictable, people are just switching off or retreating to factions. Thus, the usual power sources prevail by default.
It's a dumb process because the process has become reified; an end in itself. Oh, look mum, I can set up a straw man and shoot it down! Aren't I clever!
No, that's not clever at all; that's an outdated old modernist delusion. Staking a position on the constituents of the atmosphere of some new moon spotted somewhere has very few human implications. Staking a position on matters involving other humans is quite a different matter.
For example, can you really, in your mind's eye, weigh up half a billion people coming out of poverty? Which token do you have that represents the felt, lived emotions and aspirations and efforts of half a billion people—from children to the elderly? Do you even have a token that captures one single human in all his or her complexity?
And there we are reducing the lived human experience of 1.4B people to a single token called "the Chinese" that we push about on our chessboards and pontificate over! You agree we should be humble, but that's missing the point by a mile. It's not even vaguely rational, let alone humble; and if you seriously think people should take actions based on it, it's grossly negligent.
We have, as the poststructuralists have rightly pointed out, reached our limits. Their response is much less about denying positionality than you think; it's more about demanding fair and nuanced negotiation based on a recognition of the complexity of the human experience.
In the end, everything that matters and excites passes through the subjective human experience. This is why, as I've argued before, most people allow for the abortion right; they know they just can't access the lived psychiatry of certain people in certain situations, and thus at the very least allow for variation in situations of ambiguity such as the "personhood" of a fetus (Classical Greek > Latin > Old French > Old English: foetus )
This is also why the New Atheist attack on religion was so wide of the mark. The lived experience of the phenomenon of "religion", like the lived experience of a Chinese teenager hoping to make it to a good university in a top-tier city, buttressed by the lived experiences of mum and grandma, and dad's efforts off working in another city, all the while going through puberty and trying to shape an identity amongst his peers both within a huge country and a brave new global context, is so beyond external grasp as to be impossible to reduce to simple statements, let alone grouped with a billion other such experiences and reduced to a single token on our mental chessboards.
Even I have resisted applying this to near circles, which is why I'm happy to argue on Nick's or with friends at the pub or with my immediate family until the cows come home. This is because we at least feel like we share enough symbolism to say things which make sense to each other, even if they infuriate. But, even that is obviously up for grabs given the extent to which the views are irreconcilable and immovable.
Dumb Hegelianism is no longer good enough, I would argue. It comes from simpleton imperialist times when elite thugs with spare time would reduce everyone else to tokens on their play board—a tradition carried on by neoconservatives and just about anyone talking about China, Islam, Arab-Muslims, Aboriginal peoples, and on and on.
New Atheists might argue it's inevitable or natural. But is it really in the sense they mean? To me, it's looks more inevitable or natural insofar as it makes them feel important. Wrestling with doubt and complexity is pretty basic to any serious decisions we make in our own personal lives; why would decisions concerning others be any less complex? You don't push your own token around on your imaginary chessboard, so why push others around on it?
Reducing others to tokens is a brain trick to make us feel in control; it works to the degree it has historically worked. But is that good enough for us today? Isn't it more likely a destructive, thuggish delusion when placed in the context of a highly-complex, highly-populated, highly-integrated, highly-urban world?
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| David wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | | For instance, on your Germany analogy, I'm not sure what makes you so confident people had enough information; that sounds like a received rather than a researched idea. If people are hopelessly ignorant today, just imagine how ignorant they'd have been in the 1940s. Just look at how cringeworthy and dumb war propaganda from that period looks today! People apparently would've believed anything flashed before them on a screen. |
And yet, isn't this kind of ignorance the stuff that critical mass is made of? It's the difference between us voting ourselves into a North Korea or a progressive technocracy. We need such simplistic views in order for society to function.
While I also value humility—as you say, it is vital that we allow ourselves from time to time to say "I don't know"—we can't lose sight of the fact that there are a good many people out there who are considerably less knowledgeable and endlessly willing to speak their kind. This is why it's important for me to see public debate as a process of argument and counterargument, assertion and correction, as opposed to hesitance and self-censorship (or worse still, censorship of others).
I'm not sure why you say this Hegelian method of arguing leads to a "might makes right" conclusion. I would have thought encouraging the more thoughtful non-specialists to hold their peace until they've done field work is even more likely to lead to that scenario. Surely, after all, this would stop us from passing comment on 90% of the topics we're interested in, while Jacqui Lambie proceeds to regale us with her curious interpretation of Sharia Law. That sounds disastrous to me.
Speaking of Lambie, this is neither here nor there, but I've noticed a trend over the last decade of conservatives (particularly on the far right) beginning to embrace China and Russia. It's obvious why they approve of Putin's regime—even those still obsessed with Cold War rivalries probably masturbate to his economic policy when they know no-one's looking—but the appeal of China seems slightly less obvious. What I do know is that I'll never forget my former One Nation-voting Dad telling me last year that he considers the modern Chinese model (or, at least, his impression of it) to be the ideal form of what a society should be. Authoritarian capitalism seems to tickle his fancy. Just an anecdote, but just shows how strange the human mind can be.
There's much more to your post to respond to, but I have to go to work. |
Too much in this thread to go through but I can help you with why the Right is falling a little in love with China. China isn't a communist utopia, it far more resembles what one might have imagined National Socialist Germany might have become if it had won the war. Those with a lean towards the Nazi ideal (sans the Racial element) tend to favour China.
Putin is finding popularity by standing as a bulwark against the perceived 'degeneracy' of the West; homosexuality, socialism, decay of family values. A patriarch and protector. This resonates fairly strongly with certain disenfranchised sections of the Right.
Of course, this is all just observational philosophy, but that's how I see it. |
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