Don’t You Think It’s Time to Start Thinking?

By Northrop Frye

A STUDENT often leaves high school today without any sense of language as a structure.He may also have the idea that reading and writing are elementary skills that he mastered in childhood, never having grasped the fact that there are differences in levels of reading and writing as there are in mathematics between short division and integral calculus.

Yet, in spite of his limited verbal skills, he firmly believes that he can think, that he has ideas, and that if he is just given the opportunity to express them he will be all right. Of course, when you look at what he's written you find it doesn't make any sense. When you tell him this he is devastated.

Part of his confusion here stems from the fact that we use the word “think” in so many bad, punning ways. Remember James Thurber's Walter Mitty who was always dreaming great dreams of glory. When his wife asked him what he was doing he would say. “Has it ever occurred to you that I might be thinking?”

But, of course, he wasn't thinking at all. Because we use it for everything our minds do, worrying, remembering, day-dreaming, we imagine that thinking is something that can be achieved without any training. But again it's a matter of practice. How well we can think depends on how much of it we have already done. Most students need to be taught, very carefully and patiently, that there is no such thing as an inarticulate idea waiting to have the right words wrapped around it.

They have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don't know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach.

The operation of thinking is the practice of articulating ideas until they are in the right words. And we can't think at random either. We can only add one more idea to the body of something we have already thought about. Most of us spend very little time doing this, and that is why there are so few people whom we regard as having any power to articulate at all. When such a person appears in public life, like Mr. Trudeau, we tend to regard him as possessing a gigantic intellect.

A society like ours doesn't have very much interest in literacy. It is compulsory to read and write because society must have docile and obedient citizens. We are taught to read so that we can obey the traffic signs and to cypher so that we can make out our income tax, but development of verbal competency is very much left to the individual.

And when we look at our day-to-day existence we can see that there are strong currents at work against the development of powers of articulateness. Young adolescents today often betray a curious sense of shame about speaking articulately, of framing a sentence with a period at the end of it.

Part of the reason for this is the powerful anti-intellectual drive which is constantly present in our society. Articulate speech marks you out as an individual, and in some settings this can be rather dangerous because people are often suspicious and frightened of articulateness. So if you say as little as possible and use only stereotyped, ready-made phrases you can hide yourself in the mass.

Then there are various epidemics sweeping over society which use unintelligibility as a weapon to preserve the present power structure. By making things as unintelligible as possible, to as many people as possible, you can hold the present power structure together. Understanding and articulateness lead to its destruction. This is the kind of thing that George Orwell was talking about, not just in Nineteen Eight-Four, but in all his work on language. The kernel of everything reactionary and tyrannical in society is the impoverishment of the means of verbal communication.

The vast majority of things that we hear today are prejudices and cliches, simply verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking. It is not until we realize these things conceal meaning, rather than reveal it, that we can begin to develop our own powers of articulateness.

The teaching of humanities is, therefore, a militant job. Teachers are faced not simply with a mass of misconceptions and unexamined assumptions. They must engage in a fight to help the student confront and reject the verbal formulas and stock responses, to convert passive acceptance into active, constructive power. It is a fight against illiteracy and for the maturation of the mental process, for the development of skills which once acquired will never become obsolete.

• Reprinted from University of Toronto Columns.

Copyright 1986 Toronto Star, All Rights Reserved.

@ZDL@mstdn.social

Note: I am not a believer in BadWrongFun™. I do not think that you are a bad person if you like things that I don't like. This is not a hit piece on your taste. But it might be a hit piece on your frugality. Read on.

A stellar tea described

As I sit here in my office, I'm sipping a lovely cup of 南京雨花茶 (Nánjīng Yǔhuā chá, Nanjing Yuhua tea). This is a famously subtle, light tea that needs patience to allow flavours to build up before they can be fully appreciated. When you first take a sip it's almost a disappointment. The liquor is pale like spring straw, and the taste is thin, almost watery. A hint of sweetness, a touch of nuttiness like chestnut, maybe a ghost of toasted pine. It's clean, cool, vegetal, and it vanishes almost immediately.

You could be forgiven for thinking this tea's reputation is grossly overrated.

But then you wait. You take a second sip a while later. And things have changed. The flavour is now clear; the thinness has fattened up. The sweet chestnut nuttiness now builds on a foundation; a kind of tingly basis on the middle of the tongue. The pine note has sharpened, giving ghosts even of dill weed: bright and resinous. And at the back of the tongue a strong umami note is beginning to build.

Sip after sip the taste develops. The sweetness transforms into a cooling finish that coats the back of the throat. The nuttiness develops into something stronger: think almonds, but raw, not roasted. The umami strengthens into something like a delicate vegetable soup's broth. Every sip layers over the previous, changing the flavour with each exposure.

This tea is not loud. It is patient and requires patience to appreciate. As you sit with it, patiently sipping, it shows off the molecules it arranges on your palate sequentially, one after another. The finish stretches for almost half a minute: a faint, sweet, yet astringent dryness that makes you reach for the next sip.

It's a tea that begins as nothing, but slowly, patiently, becomes everything. It is a true world-class green whose reputation is well-deserved.

...unless...

Unless, of course, you put milk into it. Or sugar. Because milk and sugar do to fine teas what the law at the end of Rush's “The Trees” does:

And the trees are all kept equal by hatchet, axe, and saw.

Milk in particular is the great leveller of tea. It is the hatchet, the axe, the saw, the chainsaw, and the forest fire that keeps all trees equal by force. If you're a fan of milk in tea, however, you likely won't understand this or believe it. So today I'm going to give you the science. And if you still want to drink your tea with milk and/or sugar (and there is nothing wrong with this!), I'll be saving you a lot of money in the bargain!

The lesser ruination

The addition of sugars to green tea has a direct, measurable negative effect on its “phenolic” compounds, the very core of its flavour profile. Sugar cuts away approximately 1% of the free radical scavenging activity of tea's phenols per 1% of sugar added. So you are, in effect, paying for a full symphony orchestra, but then smearing glue over the instruments that play the notes.

If you are the kind of person who brews the tea together with the sugar, instead of adding it afterwards, there's another effect that may come into play.

Tea brewing relies on diffusion. Flavour compounds move from an area of high concentration (the leaf) to lower concentration (the water). Dissolving sugar into the water changes the osmotic environment that the tea is diffusing into, subtly altering the extraction dynamics.

The result could be (the physics is sound, but there has not been any direct study of it in tea that I've seen) that fewer of the tea's volatiles are extracted. You have to make up for it by brewing for longer. And that causes the more unpleasant flavour elements to concentrate, ironically turning your tea more bitter because of the sweetener being present.

The greater bringer of devastation

Sugar in tea is ketchup on cordon bleu cuisine. It's a negative, but it doesn't stop the flavours from appearing. It merely reduces our experience of them.

By comparison milk in tea is a wrecking ball swinging through a garden shed. It leaves nothing worthwhile in its wake.

Let me explain.

At the heart of milk's devastation lies a class of proteins called caseins, which make up about 80% of milk's total protein.

These caseins form large colloidal structures known as casein micelles. Their surfaces are rich with proline residues, which have a unique affinity for phenolic compounds. And this isn't a weak affinity. It's robust, multi-point, non-covalent cross-linking acting through hydrophobic interactions and hydrogen bonding. Which is an appropriate pair of words to end that sentence on since the effect is vaguely like a hydrogen bomb in its impact on flavour.

The subtle complexity that forms the unique signature of each fine tea comes from tea polyphenols (TPP). When milk is added, the casein micelles sweep in and bind to these polyphenol compounds, effectively removing the “free” polyphenols from the tea infusion. This forming of larger complexes decreases the availability of free TPP. What is perceived as “smoothness” in the mouthfeel is, in actuality, the erasure of the fine-grained profile that gives the tea its depth and complexity. The tea's delicate astringency (the building block of that flavour development I described above) is chemically neutralized at the molecular level.

Even worse, the TPP-casein binding doesn't just affect taste perception, it also suppresses and traps aromatic molecules using the same mechanism. The aerial release of the many tea volatiles is significantly suppressed by the simple addition of milk; the very aroma of the tea gets locked up before it can ever reach your nose.

As a final kick in the teeth (yes, from a wrecking ball) there's some scientific evidence that the binding of caseins to tea flavonoids reduces their antioxidant capacity and potentially their bioavailability. So not only are you flattening the flavour of a fine tea and trapping its aromatics to reduce its lovely scent, you are also paying a premium for the bioactive compounds you're about to remove anyway.

Moneysaver

The tea I started with, Nanjing Yuhua, sells at time of writing for US$55 for third-grade tea to almost US$200 for the top grade per 500g (roughly a pound) at one randomly-selected online shop. And that's the grades you can buy outside of China. The very best grades, from specific sites, picked and processed by famed masters, etc. will sell inside China (basically unavailable outside) for an order of magnitude more. It's expensive, is what I'm trying to get across.

And the flood of casein assassins your milk has unleashed into it has taken everything that makes the tea worth that cost and removed it. Indeed it may have even reduced that tea to a quality that is lower than a robust cheap green (the kind of coarse, bitter autumn chop from unnamed plantations that sells for next to nothing). Even the lowest grade of the Nanjing tea is ten cents per gram, while the highest grade you're likely to get outside of China is almost half a dollar per gram. An autumn chop is fractions of a cent per gram. And with milk, the autumn chop might actually taste better. And sugar isn't much better. Maybe the sugared Nanjing tea will taste a bit better than equivalently sugared autumn chop, but it won't be two orders of magnitude better.

So if you really do like to drink your tea with milk and/or sugar (and again I have to stress: there is absolutely nothing wrong with this!), save yourself a lot of money and buy the cheap autumn chop. It will likely taste better, and the money you save on the tea could be put to better use buying some really nice silk wall scrolls or something.

@ZDL@mstdn.social

Preamble: Words have meaning. Grammar signals meaning. Pay very close attention to the title. I worded it the way it is for a reason. Make sure you understand what I actually wrote in the title, instead of what you wanted it to read, before moving on. Note also that much of the discussion here is based on Chinese sources because—get this!—only Chinese sources have anything meaningful to say about what a term “really means”. Westerners trying to claim what it “really means” are just making idiots of themselves and revealing more about their thought processes than they reveal about Chinese ones.

A capsule history of 白左's proper meaning

In 2010, the pseudonymous “Li Shuo” coined the term 白左 (lit. “white left”) on the social platform Renren in an article titled “The Pseudo-Morality of the Western 'White Left' and China's 'Patriotic Scientists'”. At birth the term referred very narrowly to young western leftists who sympathized with the communist revolution pre-1949 and came to China to assist it. It was very much a pejorative term but it was very specifically applied to a very small number of people.

It was also a term that came from a self-identified right libertarian. Put a pin on that. We're going to circle back around to this.

As is usual in language, and doubly so in the modern Internet era, there was a rapid shift in meaning, starting in about 2013. It no longer referred to this one, specific group from history, but rather became a generalized label. The implied criticism morphed into the subtext of people out of touch with reality; people who spout lofty ideals while being blind to the real-world problems around them.

The big explosion in usage started in 2015 as bewildered Chinese netizens watched the social fallout from the refugee crisis in Europe. It is unfortunate that, from my perspective, they derived the wrong conclusion from this, criticizing, for example, Germany's “open door” policy as a case of bleeding-heart saviours ignoring reality to everyone's detriment. (Note: I don't think that Germany handled the crisis well, but I don't reach the conclusion that some Chinese netizens reached that Germany shouldn't have accepted the refugees at all.)

This big explosion continued in 2016 as bemused Chinese observers divided on which was worse: Hilary Clinton's so-called “political correctness” or Trump's populism. (Note: both were considered bad. They weren't deciding on which they supported, they were deciding on which of the two was the worst.) In that period, 白左 finally settled in a relatively stable meaning as a criticism of western identity politics.

Now let's add the wrong meaning

Here's where we circle back to the origin. In 2017 the term was added to the Urban Dictionary with an already divergent meaning. It was largely correct, but it already contained the seeds of how the term would be read in the west: right wing. UD rapidly had definitions added that included equivalents to “libtard”, “woke”, and other very American views on life. This is the unfortunate product of people not understanding several key things and instead focusing on the first use of it by a self-proclaimed libertarian right-wing guy.

However it wasn't until 2021 that Tucker Carlson's use of the term to attack Democrats that 白左 became part of mainstream western political discourse. Ironically on the right wing. (I find it personally hilarious that a 电视脱口秀演员 like Carlson, a veritable 流量奸商 or 右壬, didn't introduce other terms from Chinese that were as harshly critical of the right like 川建国 or 懂王 being used to describe Donald Trump. It's almost as if he was cherry-picking Chinese criticisms of the west to only attack one side. Almost.)

This is why most westerners believe that Chinese people are right-supportive. Because one Chinese political epithet that was poorly-understood and badly-translated was weaponized by the Anglophone right and used as an unsubtle bludgeon against their opposition. All while ignoring the far less subtle open critiques of the American right.

For purposes of this essay we will be sticking with the correct usage. And if you don't think the Chinese usage of a Chinese term used in Chinese net haunts is the correct one, get out of here. This blog isn't for you. I'm sure there's some white supremacy sites you'll like better. Like Faux News or the New York Times. Or maybe Storm Front.

Note: I'm not saying that study of the term's evolution and abuse in Anglophone circles is not a valid field of study; that's sociolinguistics in a nutshell, in fact. I'm saying I'm focusing on the Chinese usage of a Chinese term because the abuse of language by barbarians is out of scope. (Yes, the use of “barbarians” is a joke.)

The interesting spin-off

While the American left was reacting badly to the American right weaponizing a foreign term that neither side fully understood, the Chinese use of the term, with the rise of 网左 (Internet left) as a concept, started to be applied domestically as a criticism of overly dogmatic Chinese leftists. Observers tracking trends in Chinese cyberspace consistently document 白左 and 网左 appearing across political discussions, with trend reports confirming this usage as recently as late 2025. Being branded 白左 was in effect saying “you're so dogmatically left that you're like a white person”.

So a term that started life as a criticism of a historical group of people by a right-libertarian, that then mutated as a criticism of perceived impractical leftists in the west (getting internalized at that stage by the west), and then mutated further is now a domestic criticism of Chinese people by Chinese people.

But ... why? Why is this term so long-lived and so adaptive?

Here's where I get personal

The reason is ... white people don't really have a great reputation in non-white circles. It's a shock, I know, but you don't. And yes, right now, I'm addressing white folk. Even the white folk that have “good intentions”.

See the problem is that a whole lot of white people have good intentions. But they also have a degree of arrogance that is staggering. It was white people, for example, who set back queer culture in China, losing three decades of careful diplomacy that was paying dividends in recognition and acceptance ... until an arrogant LGBTQ+ group in the USA convinced a group in Shanghai that a pride parade, one that didn't have permission from authorities, was how you get results.

And they weren't wrong. There were definitely results. And the queer community in China has suffered for it nationally. About 40-70 million queer people (according to UN-aligned estimates), who were finally making positive steps toward recognition and acceptance, are back being suppressed, closeted, and and viewed with intense suspicion and revulsion. The only thing that hasn't been reversed as a result of that disastrous American intervention is the medical position on homosexuality, et al. We're thankfully not reverting back to the stage where being queer is a mental disorder that can be “cured”...

Did they mean to do this? OF COURSE NOT! Hell, I'll go a step farther. They weren't the whole reason. Rather like how there's a whole host of machinery inside a gun that has to work in concert to expel the bullet from it, there was a whole host of public security frameworks and public opinion shifts that were part of the sudden reversals in LGBTQ+ rights in China.

The thing is, that machinery in guns needs a trigger to be pulled to put it into action and send that bullet on its way. And the same was needed for the sudden shift in LGBTQ+ rights in China. The Shanghai affair was the trigger. The Chinese state, in its modern form and in much of its imperial past, has operated on a simple premise: unsanctioned public confrontation is not a tactic of persuasion, but a challenge to authority. The methods of response have shifted; the underlying logic has not. The pattern is consistent across history: method matters as much as or more than the message. Even when the state was leaning toward acceptance of queer culture, despite the already dubious status it had as “foreign ideological infiltration”, the open defiance of holding a public protest without permission was a uniquely potent trigger that led to the sudden, drastic, tragic reversals.

The sad fact of the matter is that good intentions and five bucks gets you a small coffee at Starbucks. What matters is outcomes, and the outcomes of the 白左 set are largely negative. The “white left” believes that just being “in the right” is enough; they're generally living in safe environs (by world standards) and think they know things better from their cruising altitude of 30,000ft than boots on the ground.

They're very much a model of people out of touch with reality, who think that having their heart bleed is enough for them to be a force for good, who ignore reality in favour of ideals and slogans. They're the Red Guard, in short. They spout slogans and ideals, without regard to physical reality, and leave misery and death in their wake.

On the title

The title of this rant is On the toxicity of “白左” or “white left”. Note that it's not the white left. It is the quoted term.

That, in the end, is what this essay is really about. Yes, it contains vituperative criticism of white “liberals” and “progressives”. (And, naturally, of the white right.) But I want to focus back on the term. I am, quite self-awarely and ironically, using the term to diagnose a pattern even as, starting now, I warn against its reification.

I've explained why the term has proven so long-lived and adaptive. But the more important question is: should it be? It gained traction because it described a real phenomenon. It was short, pithy, and largely accurate from the perspective of its original users. And it could be deployed across a wide variety of contexts.

That, however, is precisely where the problem lies. Its adaptability allows it to serve legitimate criticism of a genuine political tendency, but it's just as easily wielded as a bludgeon by the Western right (but who cares about barbarian duckspeak?)¹ to attack ideological opponents: “See, even Chinese netizens think libtards are bad, LOL!” And it's used, too, to beat down sincere leftists who need guidance in praxis, not dismissive labels and silencing. Its very pithiness makes it, in my view, a textbook example of Orwellian “duckspeak”: catchy, universally deployable, but ultimately a substitute for thought.

It becomes an excuse to shirk our duty to educate, to guide, and to build toward a more coherent, humane future. Just like the sloganeering of the 白左 themselves.

¹ I will personally send 500g of my favourite tea to the first person who figures out this deep cut of a joke!

@ZDL@mstdn.social

Billionaires are by definition greedy assholes.¹

But do you have proof!?

It's not proof, as such. It's a thought experiment; more an invitation to analysis than a formal proof of any kind.

So how does this work?

Well, OK, this is where it gets cinematic. If you've ever seen either of the movies Brewster's Million or Brewster's Millions you've got the gist of it already. All I'm doing is stripping away the story-telling shenanigans and the gratuitous happy ending. So...

I'm going to give you a million dollars.

Wow! Thanks!

Not literally. Thought. Experiment. Pretend I've given you a million dollars.

OK... Thanks. I guess.

Now the thing is you have to spend it all today. And all on yourself. Buy your heart's desire. As long as you spend every cent of that million dollars today.

OK! That's easy! I'm going to buy...

...a car, a house, a nice collection of outfits and a wardrobe to put it in, right? Plus all the high quality equipment you've longed for in your hobby. And, Hell, why not?, you're going to throw a massive “all my friends are invited” party.

Was I close?

...well, maybe.

Good. You've spent your million. Anybody who has any imagination at all can spend their million in no time flat. There's a place tucked away in most people's head where they dream of what they'd do with a million dollars (or equivalent local currency).

So ... next day rolls around. You're enjoying the things you bought (though things like the house you're having built may take a while to actually live in—you can enjoy the visions in your head in the mean time). I come up to you again. And I give you another million dollars.

You what now?

You heard me. You have another million dollars. You have to spend it today.

What happens if I don't?

You don't want to know. Imagine the worst thing that could ever befall you. That's what I'll do to you.

Well, luckily I've got loads of stuff I want to buy!

We usually do. So day two is over. You've spent two million dollars in two days. And next day I'm there, like bad breath after a night of drinking. And you've got another million dollars.

...

And another the day after that. And the day after that. And the day after that. And the day after that.

... That's a lot ...

And the day after that. And the day after that. And the day after that.

...

...

How many days could you keep this up? Spending a million dollars a day? Seven days? A month if you're really good at this? How long will it take for you to have enough? How long before spending a million dollars a day becomes more a chore than a joy? How long until you get so overrun with things that your life feels joyless and empty? How many cars do you need to own? How many houses? How much clothing? How many fine wines, cigars, teas, or whatever else you fancy? How long until it's ENOUGH for you?

Honestly I don't think I'd last more than two weeks before I was set for life!

Right. Most normal people wouldn't know what to do past a month at the outside. (That's what the movie Brewster's Millions was about, after all: Brewster had no idea what to do after a while with 30 million dollars that had to be spent in 30 days.)

But ... tough.

Because you keep getting a million dollars a day. You have to spend that million dollars each and every day or the worst thing you can think of happening to you happens.

Day after day after day I come to your door, looming in the threshold, giving you a million dollars. Day after day after day you have to buy a million dollars of things, spent only on yourself.

There's no respite. There's no end. Your daily chore, your entire existence, is finding ways to spend a million dollars on yourself. And this goes on for almost two years and nine months. (Two years and 270 days, to be more precise.) Then, finally, it mercifully stops.

Because you've finally spent one billion dollars, one million dollars at a time daily.

... What, really?!

Yes. Really. To spend a billion dollars at a ludicrous rate of a million dollars per day you'd need close to three years. And this is assuming you're not somehow making money in that time. That you're just spending that one billion.

After 2.75 years—almost three years—you've been likely driven to near-madness (or perhaps even been driven over the brink) by the burden of just spending that money.

Yeah ... that's ...

And a billionaire is a person for whom that amount of money isn't enough.

¹ Hot take, I know. Very radical.

@ZDL@mstdn.social

There are, in most (all?) current societies, three general classes of people. I'm going to group them under the terms “Crown”, “Nobility”, and “Commoners”. I'm only using these labels as a short, convenient term intended as a placeholder for more complicated things. To ensure we're all on the same page, I'll explain each term as it is intended to be used in this essay.

Crown

In essence the Crown is the nominal head of state. The Crown is the person (or group) officially “in charge” on paper at least. It could a king in an ancient feudal state, or it could be a dictator in a fascist state, or it could be an elected parliament or some other such thing. The key is that the Crown is the titular (if not necessarily de facto) source of all authority in society for a given time. (In a democracy authority is supposedly the people's, but in practical democracies that authority is exercised in a punctuated way that swaps out authorities at need: in essence in practical democracies the people vote who gets to be the source of all authority for a bounded period of time.)

Nobility

Nobility represents, in this model, people of extreme power. This could be literal nobility like the powerful lords in feudal states, or it could be powerful corporations in fascist or democratic states. The source of the Nobility's power can be diverse: land holdings, military might, money, or some combination of all three. Whatever the source, however, they are powers to be reckoned with that the Crown and the Commoners both need to be aware of.

Commoners

Statistically speaking: you and I. Normal people without any formal authority, without any real, meaningful power at the societal level. Ordinary workers, small business owners, etc. Just regular people with varying degrees of mild authority or power or wealth, but nothing compared to the juggernauts of Crown and Nobility.

A little note on hierarchy

Note that some people who are Nobility at, say, a national scale might be Crowns at a local scale. For example a corporate CEO in North America is part of Nobility, but is also Crown of their corporation. This hierarchical arrangement goes right down to family structures where the parents might be Nobility in the neighbourhood association but Crown in their homes.

The eternal struggle

From Orwell we get the rather pessimistic outlook that the Crown (which he called the upper class) and the Nobility (which he called the middle class) are locked into an eternal struggle: Nobility wanting to exchange places with the Crown with Commoners (which he called proles) just useful tools of the middle and upper classes in their goals. And ... he's not wrong. This is pretty much identical to the model I'm using, but more pessimistically worded. In his view the Commoners (proles) are eternally getting stamped on by their “betters” of the Crown and Nobility.

In my model that struggle exists. It's just that the relationship of the commoners to the struggling parties is slightly different. This is because a Crown with any degree of enlightened, long-term self-interest will want to remain Crown for a long time and will not want to succumb to the Nobility.

Scenario 1: Crown sides with Commoners

In one scenario, the Crown sides with the Commoners, putting restrictions on the Nobility' powers for the benefit of the Commoners. The Crown is still the Crown, mind. The Crown still holds all the reins of power. The Crown doesn't have to be good, or kind, or moral ... just SMART.

See, there is one power Commoners have. (The secret word is Jacquerie!) They have the power to overthrow society entirely, and this is a power that fed-up Commoners have used through the ages. The Yellow Turbans of late-Han China. The Bolsheviks of Russia. The Revolutionaries of the USA. Yes, in many cases, that power was cynically directed by other powers, but the fact still remains: Commoners can completely tear down the social order.

A Crown who is aware of this power and who (rightly) fears this power will step gently. Will ensure that the Commoners are at least mostly satisfied with their lot. Will make sure that Commoners don't get fed up to the point of triggering empire-destroying wars.

A society which has such a smart Crown, working against the Nobility to keep the Commoners at least mildly contented will be a stable and long-lasting one. The moment the Crown forgets this, society gets unstable and, ultimately, when (not if!) taken too far, collapses at the hands of the Commoner mob.

Which brings us to...

Scenario 2: Crown sides with Nobility

When this happens, instability invariably follows. If carried on for too long, that instability causes society to fall apart, usually in an orgy of violence directed against the Crown and Nobility both. Society collapses and is replaced with something else. That something else always seems to be hierarchical in nature and always seems to have a Crown of some sort (Lenin, say, in Russia) and Nobility (wealthy landholders, say, in post-Revolution USA). The cycle repeats itself as Crowns side with Commoners to rein in the Nobility until the Crown takes the fatal misstep of working with the Nobility to ... lather, rinse, repeat.

So how does Scenario 2 happen? If it always leads to the eventual destruction of society, why would any smart Crown ever side with Nobility?

The key word there is “smart”. Nothing guarantees that the Crown will be smart. The Crown may have stumbled into power. Or maybe the first Crown was smart but the children/grandchildren/whoever inherited down the line were idiots. Or maybe the Commoners elected an idiot for any number of reasons (including machinations of the Nobility) in purported democracies.

Once a stupid, or at least short-sighted, Crown is in power, the siren's song of wealth and power from the Nobility is hard to resist. After all Nobility has more in common, socially, with the Crown than do Commoners. If the Crown isn't careful, they'll forget that the Nobility are their enemies and are trying to tear them down to put one of their own in the Crown.

And in the mean time the Commoners fester and stew in increasing resentment until it's time to burn everything down again.

Hopeless?

The picture I paint is bleak, but it's bleak because anything made with forced hierarchy is pretty much automatically bleak. When you embrace the concept of innate authority in any way, you're giving up and are falling into this model. (The fact that this model fits almost every historical society ever with only mild shaving needed around the edges is a tragic observation.)

Don't believe the lies of the Nobility or Crown, even if the Crown is “on your side” as in Scenario 1. There is no such thing as innate authority. Authority is granted and should be taken away as soon as it's proven to be unworthy. And if that means occasionally burning down a building or ten to hammer home the point, go for it! (Just be aware that the Crown and the Nobility both have very large amounts of power that they will direct against you! This will cost you, personally.)

And while you're not taking authority away, try ignoring it where it's convenient. Work with your fellow Commoners to make your life better while dodging the machinations and vile behaviour of the Nobility and Crown. Make the schemes of both as irrelevant as possible to your life.

For instance in the modern age that could mean not using corporate social media; use organic social media that's not driven by the corporate world and agenda instead. (If you're reading this it's likely that's what you're doing now, in fact!) It could also mean doing business with each other. It could mean learning how to repair goods instead of throwing them away and buying new ones. It could mean feeding those less fortunate than you, or giving them a place to at least rest.

Treat your fellow Commoners, in short, like humans instead of falling for the lies of the Crown and the Nobility.

@ZDL@mstdn.social

Declaración universal de los Derechos de los niños a escuchar cuentos

Now ignoring the utterly cringe-worthy wording of even the title[1], which (for those who don't speak Spanish like, say, me) in English says, according to DeepL, “Universal Declaration of the Children's Rights to Listen to Stories”, there's a whole lot to unpack in this short document. I've put the DeepL translation at the bottom of this rant so you can follow along.

I should be clear before I start that I'm not opposed to the ghost of the idea that's behind this pile of glurge. As such I will be making some specific recommendations at the end to improve it. But first I'll have to start unpacking this perfect example of left-flavoured white supremacy.

Universality

The “declaration” is termed Universal, meaning the declarers consider it to apply to everybody around the world. This is further cemented by the name of the organization publishing this “universal declaration”: the International Storytelling Network.

Inconsistency

Item 1 says that it advocates the “most beautiful stories from all the oral traditions of the world”. And then proceeds to cite not a one. There's not a single Russian or Saudi or Iranian or Indian or Bangladeshi or Vietnamese or Chinese or Innu or Kazakh or Turkish or Georgian or Tanzanian or Ethiopian or ... and the list goes on and on and on ... author or story cited anywhere else in the document. This is quite arguably the single most grotesquely offensive part of this document (and the largest motivator in me writing this rant).

Recommended authors

So why is there not a single non-Eurosphere author listed in section 5 among “all the books, stories and poems” whose authors adults are “obliged to make available”? There's eight writers cited, all of whom are in the Eurosphere, most of whom are, I'm guessing, Spanish or Portuguese (I can't really tell apart by names, sorry), and not a single person from outside the, putting it bluntly, white European world. Not one.

Referenced stories

The referenced stories in section 10, where I recognize them through (bad) translation, are purely white European in origin. Of the two I don't recognize, one of them might possibly be African in origin (but given the tenor of the rest of the list it likely isn't). I'm not going to recite the list of nations above again. Just scroll up and read the list again and ask yourself where the folk stories from these nations and hundreds more! might be.

Cultural values

This phrase in section 1 is a killer to me: “... especially those that stimulate the child's imagination and critical thinking”. This is for a few reasons.

First, an incoherent, meandering list of ten vague “universal”, “international” declarations is not exactly a good place to be talking about stimulating critical thinking. Someone needed to apply a bit of critical thinking to this list before shouting it out to the world.

Next, there's this bizarre assumption that stories which stimulate a Eurosphere child's imagination will stimulate all children's imaginations where the truth is far more likely that many stories that are in the cultural background of the Eurosphere, with its Biblical-based moral and cultural assumptions, are going to cause confusion and incomprehension rather than stimulate imagination.

Lest you think I'm imagining this and that story appeal is universal, one problem I had when teaching English to Chinese students was precisely that storytelling style in China is very different from storytelling style in Europe and descended cultures. Most notably the children were very uncomfortable that there was no moral to be taken from the story attached at the end. It was disquieting to them that the desired “lesson” to be taken from the story was not there. I'd spend half a class explaining how to discern the moral indirectly by analysis only to be told that this was wasteful when the writer could have just said it. They, in short, didn't get their imaginations stimulated by the stories because the stories were alien in structure (not to mention content).

Finally, the cultures that value harmonious coexistence and communal effort are not going to exactly agree with individual imagination and “critical thinking” as a goal. (Are they wrong to not value individual critical thinking? Not our place to decide for them!) For a “universal” declaration it's looking mighty white and middle class. Thus a lot of popular western stories, which seem to hinge upon the solitary hero fighting the status quo will not parse. The result of people from these cultures reading them will once again be bafflement and disquiet, not imagination and critical thought stimulation.

Translation

The “International” Storytelling Network apparently isn't sufficiently international to actually translate the document with native speakers. Instead they give a hook into Google Translate, a site that is absolutely God-awful at translation of anything that isn't whatever it is that nerds are interested in this week.

If you're an “international” group and you're making a “universal” declaration ... where are the proper translations?! Diving around that web site I see people from all over the place registered as members of this network. Why haven't any of those stepped up and provided a translation of the declaration? (Here's a hint: many of them likely wouldn't want to given the contents...)

Sheer silliness

So let's look at some (and I stress some) of the silly parts of the declaration:

2 ... the full right to demand that his parents tell him stories at any time of the day.

Any time of day?! So in these people's worlds children don't have school, apparently, and adults don't have to work, both of which, to be even marginally productive at, require restful sleep in advance.

3 ... the absolute right to ask the adult of his/her choice to tell them ...

The absolute right to demand stories from any adult? What!? If some child walks up to me when I'm going about my day and “demands” a story, I'm going to look around for the parent or guardian and give them one Hell of a tongue-lashing! Part of this is because it's presumptuous for anybody, child or not, to tell me how I spend my time, and part is because children need to learn at an early age to respect others' boundaries, not intrude upon them with demands. Do you want to raise a generation of narcissists who believe their every demand should be catered to by everybody around them at a whim? 'Cause that's how you raise such a generation! (Just ask the Chinese and their “little emperors”...)

4 ... the right to listen to stories sitting on the lap of his grandparents.

Flirting with cultural values again. Grandparents aren't the indulgent, child-spoiling crowd in all cultures. In some they're the disciplinarians. Or they're the ones keeping the household in order while the parents labour twelve hours a day. Or they're ... you know, anything but someone who can just stop, put a child on the knee, and tell stories. I'm sorry if it bothers you to know this, middle-class, suburban western woman, but in a lot of places people work hard until literally the day they die. There's no universal privileged class of people who can just sit around and tell stories on demand by virtue of age.

7 ... their parents are in the obligation to decontaminate them [ed: of television] leading them by the ways of the imagination of the hand of the hand of a good book of infantile stories.

The idiotic anti-technology vibe is noted and rejected. There is quality television and there is crap television. Not all kids are interested in books, much like not all kids are interested in, say, caterpillars. Stop forcing your very middle-class, very white values on everybody else! If children are motivated to tell their own stories based upon what they see on television let them do it, dammit! Just because you're a Luddite (as am I: I don't watch television) doesn't mean you get to inflict that stance on everybody else in the world!

8 Adults have the obligation to nourish themselves permanently with new stories, their own or not, with or without kings, long or short.

Not all adults have skill in making up new stories, nor time in memorizing them. Again, only the white middle class in the Eurosphere systematically has a parent who can afford that much time to do things like this.

All this silliness is where I know that this declaration is absolutely the product of white, middle-class people (probably women). For only in this world is the conceit conceivable of making story-telling the absolute centre of every child's life. But even from this perspective some of this is ridiculous.

Sillyness: bafflement subsection

6 Every child has the full right to know the fables, myths and legends of the oral tradition of his country.

I am genuinely baffled here. Where, precisely, are they finding places on Earth where children are not permitted to know their cultural fables, myths, and legends? I've lived on a rather sizable fraction of the planet's surface and have never, not even once, encountered a place where this is true.

7 The child has the right to invent and tell his or her own stories, as well as to modify existing ones, creating his or her own version.

Same question here. Where on Earth are they finding cultures that prohibit children from inventing their own stories?

BE DECREED AND PUBLISHED

I'm hoping this is an artifact of bad mechanical translation because otherwise this is just so over the top and pretentious it deserves nothing but derision.

So how can this be fixed?

As I said at the top, I like the idea that's at the core of this declaration. I just think the execution is woefully inadequate, bordering on being simultaneously offensive and silly. So here are some specific recommendations.

• Take down the declaration as it is now. It's an embarrassment and you should be embarrassed having put it up in the first place in the state it is in.

• Take an editor's pen to some of the bombastic and silly sections. Figure out what you're actually trying to communicate there and do just that: communicate it. The current hyperbole is just not ... good. At all.

• You're an international organization with “1,300 professional storytellers from 61 countries on all continents”. Solicit their input! Whatever groups, channels, mailing lists, etc. you all communicate over, go over this declaration and have frank discussions over its merits (there are some!) and liabilities (there are many!). Then solicit the input of non-European (I fear a storytelling circle is almost always going to be middle class) people for the following items:

  • recommended authors/collections
  • recommended tales
  • cultural blinders in your assumptions of how things are done
  • a hint of realism in how children and adults both actually lead their lives

• Use that same status as an international organization with 1300 storytellers from 61 countries and translate the document properly into as many languages as you can find people comfortable with translating it for you instead of using the horrible translations that come from the clown pants-wearing Big Tech sphere.

DeepL Translation of original source document:

Universal Declaration of the Children's Rights to Listen to Stories

Compiled and adapted by the International Storytelling Network

1. Every child, without distinction of race, language or religion, has the right to hear the most beautiful stories from all the oral traditions of the world, especially those that stimulate the child's imagination and critical thinking.

2. Every child has the full right to demand that his parents tell him stories at any time of the day. Those parents who are caught refusing to tell a story to a child, not only incur in a serious crime of culpable omission, but they are also condemning themselves to the fact that their children will never ask them for another story again.

3. Every child who for one reason or another has no one to tell him/her stories, has the absolute right to ask the adult of his/her choice to tell them, as long as he/she does it with love and tenderness, which is how stories should be told.

4. Every child has the right to listen to stories sitting on the lap of his grandparents. Those who have their four grandparents alive can pass them on to other children who, for various reasons, do not have grandparents to tell them. In the same way, those grandparents who do not have grandchildren are free to go to schools, parks and other places where children gather, where they can freely tell as many stories as they wish.

5. Every child has the right to know who José Martí, Hans Christian Andersen, Elena Fortún, Lewis Carroll, Elsa Bornemann, Carlo Collodi, Gloria Fuertes, María Elena Walsh, among others, are. Adults are obliged to make available to children all the books, stories and poems of these authors.

6. Every child has the full right to know the fables, myths and legends of the oral tradition of his country.

7. The child has the right to invent and tell his or her own stories, as well as to modify existing ones, creating his or her own version. In those cases of children very influenced by the television, their parents are in the obligation to decontaminate them leading them by the ways of the imagination of the hand of the hand of a good book of infantile stories.

8. The child has the right to demand new stories. Adults have the obligation to nourish themselves permanently with new stories, their own or not, with or without kings, long or short. The only obligatory thing is that these stories be beautiful and interesting.

9. The child always has the right to ask for another story, and also to ask to be told the same story a million times.

[ed. The translation failed badly on the next section and I had to insert a few guesses of my own for what stories were being referenced where I recognized them. Where not figured out I left the translation as-is with an appended [?] to mark it.]

1. Finally, every child has the right to grow up with the adventures of Alice, Little Red Riding Hood, of “Uncle Tiger and Uncle Rabbit” [?], of that little donkey called Platero [?], of Puss in Boots, of the bunting of fairy tales [?] and of the immortal “Once upon a time...”, magic words that open the doors of imagination on the road to the most beautiful dreams of childhood.

BE DECREED AND PUBLISHED

[1] I sincerely hope it isn't as cringe-inducing in the original Spanish as it is when translated to English!

@ZDL@mstdn.social

Today I'm going to highlight, far more brieflyin just as obsessive depth, a specific case of narrative-building which I will use to expound upon some propaganda techniques used in the world press.

CNN is press, press sucks, ergo CNN sucks; Q.E.D.

We open with a link to a story on CNN: “China Eastern takes delivery of the world’s first made-in-China C919 jet” Since CNN is noted for editing published stories in subtle ways with only cryptic comments buried at the bottom to indicate this, I'm going to also nab a snapshot of the offending passage:

The text, for those using screen readers, is this:

The C919 currently relies heavily on Western components, including engines and flight control systems, from companies such as GE (GE), Safran (SAFRF), and Honeywell International (HON).

This is a very weird thing to put into a news report. When CNN reported on the release of the Airbus A380 I don't recall seeing a paragraph like this:

The A380 currently relies heavily on American components including engines from Engine Alliance (GE/P&W) ...

Nor do I remember a paragraph like this on reportage from the release of the Boeing 737-MAX:

The 737-MAX currently relies heavily on French components including engine technology from Safran ...

So why the difference?

Hint: It's just the narrative

The difference lies in exactly why I despise the press: there is a narrative that the press wants to establish based on its masters, and that narrative drives all reportage. Western media is owned by a very small number of very wealthy people or by governments these days. Each has its own agenda, naturally, but in general billionaires want the same thing (low taxes, open trade with impunity), and governments in the west tend to be beholden to billionaires to varying degrees.

China's very existence as the #2 world economy (and rising fast) is a threat to this wannabe oligarchy since the Chinese government caters to a disjoint set of billionaires (i.e. not western billionaires) and, too, tends to actually worry more about long-term stability over short-term gains. Chinese governance, especially as exemplified by just how stunningly badly the west handled COVID-19, is a threat to the burgeoning plutocracy the billionaire class is building in the west with such single-minded patience.

Obviously this cannot stand. So the west's propaganda instruments (their much-vaunted “free press”, beholden to monied interests yet somehow still laughably called “free”) tell narratives. Fairy stories, really, with just enough truth to them to let the unwary (most readers) not see the meticulous use of classic story-telling techniques.

What are these techniques?

There are several techniques used. I'll address three examples of them:

• casual dismissal of accomplishment;
• othering; and,
• motive-mongering.

Casual dismissal of accomplishment

The example I used above is the technique of casual dismissal of accomplishment. “They'd never have done it without outside help.” You see it in this article about the COMAC C919 aircraft. (It's all western technology that's just being assembled in China, you see.) You see it in reportage over China's space program. (The space capsules are Soviet in design. Ignore the fact that they're larger, completely different on the interior, with better avionics than any Russian capsule has ever had in the entire history of its space program.) You see it in reports on China's electrical grid, on China's rail system, on China's shipbuilding capacity, on China's naval vessels, on China's military (and now civil) aviation ... they always include how it was “really” someone else's work that the Chinese are just aping.

And yes, I used that word “aping” for a reason: that's literally what people in the west largely think of the Chinese: subhuman.

Othering

In that long rant I linked earlier, I spent quite a bit of time babbling about the so-called facekini “craze”. There never was such a craze, naturally, and you can find evidence of this fact in the very reports on it themselves. A lot of creative photographic techniques had to be used to make it look like the facekini was a craze, to the point that this could not be an accident. People were deliberately and carefully cropping out or blurring out all the evidence that the facekini was not an actual craze.

Why?

Because the narrative has to show that the Chinese are just “weird” and “different” to otherwise “other” them. Ideally this should be done in a way that makes the reader feel superior.

Other versions of othering included all the utter and complete bullshit about masks in China where ignorant know-nothings mouthed off in media about how the Chinese were more prone to wearing masks because they believed in “Qi” and in conserving it. This is damnable violence to the memory and reputation of one Wu Liande who used evidence-based science to invent the use of PPE for mitigating and reversing horrible epidemic diseases.

You know those modern-day N95 masks that the west is (rightly!) so proud of? They're a direct descendent of the Wu mask of 1910. (Why is reportage on the N95s not commenting that these would not exist had Wu not invented the notion of PPE? I mean aside from the obvious racism.)

And, ironically, this othering has killed more westerners than Chinese despite the obvious long-haul intent. By othering the Chinese, the western press pretty much guaranteed that these manuals published by the Chinese government starting in FEBRUARY 2020 would never be followed by anybody in the west. The Handbook of COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment alone has been available (and constantly updated with the latest information) since February of 2020. As have manuals for constructing proper care and treatment wards, etc. But because it was Chinese, and the Chinese are “different from us”, it was pretty much guaranteed that, when combined with the innate white supremacy of western thought, that the advice and research contained within those publications would never be followed to infamous effect:

Motive-mongering

This dovetails nicely into the final technique I'd like to cover: motive-mongering. When you can't plausibly dismiss accomplishment, and when “othering” backfires, as it did in COVID-19 handling, there's another card you can play that will Trump all others (see what I did there?): you can cast aspersions on the motives of the “other”.

It seems daily, now, when I even bother opening a news site, that China's motives in everything are questioned. China is visiting Saudi Arabia—obviously they want to undermine America's rightful claim on Saudi oil! China is making good telephone equipment—obviously this is so they can do surveillance on the west! China makes a social media site that's a runaway success among young people—obviously they just want to spy on western youth so they can find leverage against them later on in their lives!

This would be hilarious were it not so dangerous!

Why hilarious?

1. The reports on Xi's visit to Saudi Arabia are just shy of saying the quiet part out loud: the USA feels they have a proprietary claim on Saudi oil and find it very upsetting that the Saudis might start doing business with China instead of the USA.

2. The reports on how grave a threat Chinese telephone equipment is to western interests are basically based on what we already know: every major vendor of telephony equipment in the west has espionage back doors in them to spy on people in other countries. (They've repeatedly revealed this in reports about how they caught famous international criminals and terrorists.) These breathless reports are very much hypocrisy writ large.

3. The hysterical arm-flapping over TikTok very carefully ignores that every single western social media site without exception siphons up every bit of data they can from users and non-users(!) and sells that information to whoever ponies up the cash, even foreign powers. (Facebook and Russia, for example.)

Why dangerous?

Well, I've already pointed out why bad reportage over COVID-19 and China led to millions of preventable deaths, so I won't flog that horse much more. But it goes deeper and darker than that. There's very clear war drums sounding right now, and the press, instead of questioning if this is even sane, is leaping right in to amplify the sticks on the drum heads. Ever since the collapse of the Союз Советских Социалистических Республик (СССР), the west has tried a series of existential threats to throw up in the faces of the general public in an attempt to distract attention away from domestic problems (like the USA's completely broken “democracy” or Europe's fatal error in breaking the rules for EU membership to accept nations willy-nilly or the UK's fatal Brexit error or ...). In my lifetime I've noticed these existential threats shoved in my face:

• The Cold War
• The War on Drugs (brown-skinned people from Mexico and further south)
• The War on Terror (brown-skinned people from the middle east, plus innocents mistaken as such by ignoramuses)
• Russia (round 1, at about the point Putin started gathering power)
• China (round 1, as the Beijing Olympics started to get coverage)
• Russia (round 2, at about the time that they seconded Crimea)
• China (round 2, at about the time that Chinese military technology started getting actually good)
• Russia and China (because somehow China is being blamed for Russia invading Ukraine)

I've probably overlooked several in that list, but the point remains: everything is reported through a lens of othered motivational speculation. “They” are evil because “they” are different from us and “their” motives are vile and dangerous and a threat to our existence! So don't look at the problems that are actually around you and actually impact you on a daily basis. That is what “they” want! Don't be a sucker!

And this is heading inexorably to war because there is nothing quite as dangerous as an uneducated and/or ignorant populace being driven into a frenzy by demagogues trying to conceal their own shenanigans.

So what can we do?

Well for starters, stop giving the press so much power. You live in a world now where you can directly talk to people anywhere in the world, practically. DO THAT! Don't rely on unreliable narrators with an agenda set by oligarchs to filter the world for you. Talk to the people that are actually at issue. You'll likely find that, aside from superficial surface issues, most people are not as different from you as your masters would have you believe.

I'm not saying you should stop reading the press. I'm saying you should read the press far more critically than you're doing now. I'm saying you should in particular be very wary of confirmation bias when reacting to press. Read the press from a variety of sources. Find out what people who are nominally different from you are saying. I'm also saying you should take the press to task when they distort the truth and/or flatly lie. They are supposed to serve us, not the other way around. Democracies in particular cannot succeed with a weak, craven, beholden press.

But that's only part of it. You do have to supplement the press with reports from regular people elsewhere: the clichéd “boots on the ground”. Build up social media circles that aren't algorithmically designed to put you into an echo chamber. Reach out past political, racial, cultural divides and broaden your horizons.

Or be ready for destructive war that will bring you immense misery. It's really your choice.

@ZDL@mstdn.social

Background

The original posts that started that interaction (and line of thoughts) were these:

@aurynn

the default position of all white people should be: – Recognising that you're racist – And that you don't necessarily know how you're racist – And listening to people who are impacted by racism on the ways you do racist things – And trying to change

@drV

@aurynn I would probably change that to 'of all people'. I was talking to someone a while ago who worked in a middle eastern refugee camp. She said there was a pecking order that strongly depended on how pale your skin was. I'm sure even the people at the top of that pillar experienced racism from white-white people, but that didn't stop them from being racist to people down the chain.

@aurynn Also related: the very first time I ever visited Auckland I was subjected to a long rant by an Indian taxi driver about how Māori were ruining the country.

@aurynn

@drV White supremacy infects everyone ?

It's at this point that I interjected my first response and another brief round of exchanges followed:

@zdl

@aurynn @drV

It's not always white supremacy. In China there have been social orders based on skin colour since long before anybody in China met a white person.

It's a class thing here.

Dark skin meant (means!) you work out in the sun. You were a peasant farmer. The paler your skin was, the more likely it was you were of an elevated social class.

Skin whiteners (like mercury or arsenic products) have been in use for over a thousand years here as a result, among other ways to be paler.

@aurynn

@zdl @drV thanks for your insight here. I’m not very familiar with Chinese history and I can really only speak from a position of being an unwilling participant in white supremacy, and trying to help reduce that.

@zdl

@aurynn @drV It's a laudable goal, make no mistake! Just be aware that there is some meta-supremacy when you assume everything that pattern-matches on your culture's thoughts is the same thing or is caused by your culture.

I've had to gently explain (or sometimes not-so-gently when things got strident) to well-intentioned “white man's burden” types that not everything is about white history and white sensibility; that sometimes things happen that aren't from them. It ... often goes poorly.

So, and...?

Well, this is where I first used that term “meta-supremacy”, though the thoughts leading up to that term spilling out of me have been with me for years now as I watch interaction between my newly-adopted home and the outside world.

And it boils down to this in a nutshell: It's not all about white people.

Obvious white supremacy

On the repulsive side of the fence, naturally, we have the white power types, the “ZOMG THE WHEIT RAICE IS DYEING OWT!!!!1111oneoneoneeleventy!” crowd. The openly racist racial purists, racial separatists, and other scum of the Earth. These can be safely discounted beyond monitoring and watching for them to ensure they don't cause excessive damage to the world. On the same side, but not as repulsive, are the “not all” crowd. “Not all Chinese are soulless death-mongers who eat their children, no you're different.” That kind.

Inobvious white supremacy

But on the other side of the fence we also have colonial white supremacy. Look back at this:

@drV

@aurynn Also related: the very first time I ever visited Auckland I was subjected to a long rant by an Indian taxi driver about how Māori were ruining the country.

@aurynn

@drV White supremacy infects everyone ?

See how @aurynn assumes that Indians ranting about the Māori are because of white supremacy? It's as if brown-skinned people lack all agency in the face of the White Juggernaut™. As if brown-skinned people can't be racists themselves and only become racists when toxic whiteness is introduced. Despite, as I pointed out for China at least, the Chinese preferring fair skin long before the first white guy was a thing in China. (And no, it wasn't frickin' Marco Polo! He'd painfully obviously never set foot inside China!)

Racism in general isn't white-only. Ask any Chinese people who are part of a minority. Ask Mongols in China. Or the Yi peoples. Or the Miao. Hell even among the Han there is racism. Ask the Hakka, a Han-ethnic minority.

So why does this matter?

Well, aside from the insulting assumption that only whites have agency and thus anything brown-skinned people do is a white infection, there's a darker side to this: because the causes of racism and prejudice are likely different in other cultures, even if they superficially look similar, the treatments required to mitigate and reverse them will also likely be different. If you walk into a situation like an Indian person moaning about Māori and assume that the Indian person is just reflecting the white supremacy s/he was raised under, you're going to make things worse in trying to address this, not better.

The bottom line is that, while the second batch have their hearts in the right place, they still have an outsized view of how important whites are in the grand scheme of things, seemingly unable to see anything in the world that isn't them. While they are (far!) more pleasant as people than the first batch of racialists and open supremacists, they still have a strong negative impact on the world when not held in check. (And as I hinted at in my own response above, not all of them like being held in check or corrected. @aurynn was one of the self-reflective kind and didn't seem to mind.)

OK, ZDL, you've convinced me so how do I fix this?

This one is easy, actually. If you're seeing something outside of your experience (like racism from the Chinese), ask and, importantly, listen before you react. The Chinese subtle (and not-so-subtle) “friendly” racism toward African blacks is not from the same source as American racism toward blacks. Assuming it comes from the same place will increase the problems, not reduce them.

Find out the reality before you try to address the problem. And if that reality is hard to find, perhaps consider giving this one a pass. You can't fight every battle that crosses your path. Hold your tongue, make a note to learn, and let that one instance go until you can effectively fight the problem.

But most of all, stop assuming “white concerns” and “white behaviours” have anything at all to do with whites. Racism is a human universal fuelled by the universal human condition of xenophobia. The world is a bigger, wider (and often scarier!) place than you can possibly imagine.

[1] A Twitter-alike that is a “federated” part of the “Fediverse” among other nerd-facing terms that is largely more thoughtful and friendly a place than any corporate social media is.

@ZDL@mstdn.social

Which is damned peculiar.

But let's start with a history lesson first before we address how “over” COVID-19 is, shall we?

A history lesson

The USA entered WWII officially on 1941-12-07 and fought in it until 1945-09-02. Over those 1365 days, it lost 419,400 troops and civilians to the war. That's an average, over those 3 years, 8 months, and 26 days of approximately 307 deaths per day. This represents approximately 0.00022% of the 1945 national population each and every day.

The war ended in 1945. It is currently 2022. In the nearly 77 years since that war, the people who died in it are (rightly!) remembered for their sacrifice and mourned for their absence. There are not one, but TWO national holidays dedicated at least in part to the people dead of that war. It is a major source of cultural trauma that resonates to this day.

So what does this have to do with COVID-19?

Quite a bit. In the past month of “COVID-19 is over!” the daily death rate to COVID-19 has ranged between a low of 255 and a high of 528, averaging somewhere, eyeballing that graph, between 390 to 400.

Dead.

Daily.

The “over” COVID-19 is currently killing people off at a rate higher than WORLD WAR II! And true, that rate (call it 400 for ease of calculation) is “only” about 0.00011% of the current American population, but still, 0.00022% is cause for commemoration three quarters of a century later, while half that is “meh”?

COVID-19 is far from over

COVID-19 is not “over”. It's killing 400 Americans per day alone, which puts it in the same league as, and I can't stress this enough, WORLD WAR II! And this is during a lull in the deaths. In January of 2022 it was averaging about 2000 deaths per day (and the January before that it was averaging about 2800).

All we need is another new strain, perhaps one that's vaccine resistant, for that number to go shooting through the roof again.

So the take-home message here is COVID-19 is deadlier than WWII to Americans.

And it's still going strong.

The grim future

The USA was in WWII for 3 years, 8 months, and 26 days. Day by day, on average, it lost over 300 people. COVID-19 has been with us formally (dating from the Wuhan Lockdown of 2020) for 2 years, 5 months, and 9 days. And the period of it being “over” kills more daily than the average of WWII.

Even scarier, since the death rates of both events are not constant, the actual average daily death rate of COVID-19 (deaths divided by days) is 1130. Which is is almost 4 times higher than WWII's.

And since it's not actually over, that number will only continue to rise, day by day, increasing with each new strain generated in the viral breeding factory given the odd name “The United States of America”. When 3 years, 8 months, and 26 days arrives, COVID-19 will still be killing Americans faster than WWII did.

Do you think there will be national days of commemoration set aside for these victims of western ignorance, hubris, and death worship?

@ZDL@mstdn.social

That song was entitled “Instant Expert” and was a lament about people who knew nothing at all about life in the far north who would fly up from “down south” and become instant experts on all things arctic, invariably screwing things up for the people who lived there after they got their consulting fee and flew back “down south”.

I'm reminded of this song almost every time I talk to Americans.

And yes, that specifically: Americans.

#NotAllAmericans

If you've got your back up already because I'm generalizing, and have your mind snapping shut at the notion that you might be part of this, feel free to apply the #NotAllAmericans hashtag and carry on reading.

Just be aware that I may very well be talking about you, so read and think: do you act in this way?

The unbearable weight of conversation

So, let me begin with an illustration of the problem. There's a pattern there. See if you can spot it. (If you're American you likely won't. Which is a huge part of the problem.)

Conversation #1

American: I couldn't live in China. That “social credit” system is just too Black Mirror for me! Me: “Social credit” isn't a thing. American: Yes it is! I read/heard about it in <insert American media>. Me: Yes. You did. It's fabrication. 100% false. It doesn't exist. You are being lied to. American: HOW WOULD YOU KNOW!? Me: I live in China. I live with a Chinese SO. I work in a Chinese company with Chinese coworkers. Nobody knows what you're talking about here if you say “social credit”. American: You're probably working for the CCP! Me: OK, you don't believe me, how about these American sources with detailed analysis of what “social credit” really is and how it really works based on translations from original laws and policies, complete with original sources, side-by-side translations, and detailed analyses? American: Oh. I guess it isn't a thing. Me: You figure?...

Conversation #2

Same American: Everybody knows that Chinese companies are just arms of the government. Me: No they aren't. Same American: Yes they are! I read reports in <insert American media>! Me: No. They really aren't. You're being lied to. Same American: HOW WOULD YOU KNOW!? You probably work for the CCP! Me: I live in China. I live with a Chinese SO. I work in a Chinese company with Chinese coworkers. I'm in a position of trust with the boss. I know every facet of the business from the ground up. I know for a fact there's no government involvement in business beyond the usual issues of licensure that every company in every nation in the world deals with. Same American: Oh. I guess I might have been wrong. Me: You figure?!...

Conversation #3

Same American: I won't do business with China until they admit to the massacre of students at Tiananmen Square. Me: There was no massacre of students at Tiananmen Square. Same American: Yes there was! Me: No. No, really, there wasn't. Same American: I SAW THE PICTURES! Me: You saw some pictures, yes. Taken out of context, moved geographically, all to further a narrative that was more acceptable to the rich people who owned your newspapers in 1989. Same American: Are you claiming there wasn't a massacre!? Me: No. I'm saying there was no massacre of students at Tiananmen Square. Same American: What are you talking about? Me: The massacre was of rioting workers and was the culmination of months of nationwide unrest that even included minor officials and PLA soldiers in cities all around the country. The massacre happened at Muxidi, several kilometres away from Tiananmen Square. Same American: But I saw video of tanks leaving the square! What about Tank Man!? Me: Tank Man wasn't in the square. And didn't get run over either, no matter what you think you saw. Same American: But I did see the video of him getting run over! Me: No. You didn't. Here's the full video footage, before editing for news. Same American: Oh. ... Maybe I was wrong. Me: You figure!!?!... Same American: Why are you being so angry? Me: ?

The pattern

Americans have a firm belief that they are the aforementioned Instant Experts™. They have Strong Opinions™ which they believe are Perfectly Valid™ and will fight to hold on to those beliefs at all costs. If you introduce information that is contrary to these Strong Opinions™ you are in for a draining conversation where, no matter what your relative levels of knowledge and information, you have to beat down the Strong Opinion™ (which, recall, is Perfectly Valid™) with ever-increasing amounts of proof until finally, outside of the worst of the extreme left and extreme right, they'll accept the correction.

A full-on battle royale. Every. Time.

And this is just incredibly wearying. Even friendly Americans with nothing but the best of intentions (who are not as common as you'd really wish of a world power!) have a strong tendency to be this way: they challenge everything, telling people who work in a field, live in a place, etc. what it's “really” like and won't take anything on authority, even after a repeated pattern of the person they're talking with knowing their shit.

Literally every time I speak to an American—including friends—I steel myself for Yet Another Battle Royale. I steel myself for being mansplained, whitesplained, westsplained, etc. I steel myself against the curse of the Instant Expert rearing its ugly head again and fucking up my day and the relationship.

The solution

There are actually two solutions. One is on my end (and is frequently done by others too: like how LGBTQ+ groups in China deal with this problem vis a vis American LGBTQ+ groups): avoidance. I find myself, over time, withdrawing from interactions with Americans. I ask myself when about to talk “Are you ready for another endless slog of smacking down mis- and disinformation?” And increasingly the answer is “no” and I disengage. I move on to someone else who isn't making me ask this question.

This is probably a sub-optimal solution for those who wish to actually converse, so this is where the other solution comes in. Unfortunately I don't think Americans are actually able to implement this, so the first solution is the one that is going to keep going on until, in the end, Americans find the people around them who aren't American are just not talking to them anymore. (Like the aforementioned Chinese LGBTQ+ groups.)

This second solution is based on something Americans are absolutely terrible at: humility. Something deep in the American psyche—some profound insecurity—makes admitting that they don't know something anathema. Yet, that's the first step to the real solution to this.

So have the humility to understand you don't know everything. This is true of literally every human being on the planet, incidentally. Just by way of example, the Library of Congress (only one of the very large libraries on the planet) has almost 1400km of bookshelves. That's about 40 million or so books. If we assume 250 pages per book, that's 10 billion pages. A good reading rate for non-fiction material is two pages per minute. That's five billion minutes. 83 million hours. 3.5 million days. 9.5 thousand years.

Ignorance is normal. No, it's inevitable. Embrace it and instead of trumpeting proudly on shit you don't know, take the opportunity to learn instead.

That means don't tell someone living in China for 20 years, deeply embedded by family and working life in the nation, how things “really work” there. Don't tell epidemiologists how diseases spread. Don't tell soldiers how battles are fought. Don't tell Hindus what they actually believe. Don't tell Byzantine historians ...

You get the idea.

The solution is to be humble. To listen. To learn. To ask instead of tell. Do that and you'll find that you won't be dismissed as “instant experts” and avoided with a rolling of eyes so hard that the person in question has to reach around blindly on the floor to pop the eyes back into their face.

And in the process you get two of the greatest joys of life: companionship and learning.

@ZDL@mstdn.social