Originally published at: https://www.bullshido.net/qianon-chinas-own-nationalist-moron-problem/
QAnon may be a uniquely American phenomenon, but let’s not pretend the problem of easily-duped morons is is limited to the West
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Good article minus a few points of criticism.
It’s important to discriminate bullshido vs non-bullshido TCM practices. I wouldn’t call the NIH “quacks”, and some those “non-quack” sources are a little old (and somewhat biased).
Second point, Xu Xiaodong (who I’ve written about quite a bit on BS, esp with regards to speaking out about COVID19) is fact a classically trained Sanshou fighter, who used MMA to expose what he saw as a growing misconception of CMA as weak.
Naturally, this meant going and kicking the shit out of weak kung fu “masters”.
So, his intention was to Make CMA Great Again! And he did.
Look what happened in July. Did anyone else know this?
Final point is part historical, part information warfare.
The central phenomenon behind cults like QAnon, Mao, etc. is pretty commonplace and predate modern forms of government. They go back to the dynastic era of China, the Pharaohs, ancient Sumer, all the way to Neolithic campfires and beyond.
Tall tales everywhere, but there is sense of purpose in sharing them. With the Chinese traditions this is especially true, given the great importance of respect for one’s ancestors and teachers in the Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucianist spheres, many of which overlap for specific people, especially martial artists.
Security and belonging to a pack or unit of some sort is a fundamental human drive for most people, as well as animals. In the animal kingdom it’s a necessary survival trait, for humans it’s more of a mental safety zone, that one is not alone if they choose not to be, and from that you get WWG1WGA, even if that’s into the heart of the sun.
And you’ll never find a lack of authoritarians ready to take advantage of this fact.
Whilst the article isn’t wrong (Nationalism is bad, CMA and Chinese medicine is bullshit and people should think critically) it comes across a bit too smug for me. It’s easy for us to mock people who choose to drink the kool-aid but when it’s the only drink in town and punishment for not drinking it, or even questioning what’s in it; can have a serious and immediate effect on your life, you’re probably going to have to take a sip. There’s no doubt a lot of people in China who see through the bullshit it’s government feeds them but they can’t just call it or choose an alternative like we can in the west.
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Chinese alchemy invented gunpowder, while they were looking for their own version of the Philosopher’s Stone.
Who won?
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The 10,000’ level point is that non-empirical views of the world create significant problems for everyone; chief among these problems is that they create willing participants in atrocities, hence the reference to Voltaire.
Well not everything is empirical, according to the post-Positivists (AKA post-Empiracists). If I had to sum it up in one logical phrase it would be “BOTH quality AND quantity matter”.
“We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.” - Pascal, saying it better.
This is the way.
Find me a post-positivist aircraft designer who’d fly on their own creation and we’ll talk.
Howard Hughes, in the XF-11. His eyes opened.
That’s kind of a slippery slope though right? Despite being a logical fallacy, how much tolerance for nationalist bullshit should people have?
China is presently dialing up it’s nationalist narrative and I can’t help but shake the feeling that it won’t stop until deep into the territory of straight up jingoism and a declaration of war on the West.
For example,
“The principles and policies for supporting the development of the private economy have not changed,” declared Liu, according to this report in China’s state-owned Xinhua News Agency . “They don’t change now and will not change in the future.”
Whenever the PRC used to say shit like “there is no shortage of X” everybody in town ran out to get as much X they could get their hands on because that meant there was definitely a shortage.
They still want our money but that shit is presently being used to build hundreds of nuclear missile silos.
Their state run media now controls all of their social media and heavily censors things that used to be off the table are more endangered all the time. They’re doing a full court press on all non-Sinocentric information they possibly can, including things like evolution, accounts of Western history that isn’t a list of everything bad that can be blamed on the West, anything even slightly off of their regime’s preferred narrative produces an increasingly large allergic reaction of anger, ridicule and accusation.
It’s bad shit over there right now. All of the environmental reforms and crackdowns on corruption we keep hearing about are mostly just smokescreens. They moved some factories further inland to make Beijing’s air look nicer but they didn’t actually reduce emissions. They just moved things around and cracked down on outside groups ability to track pollution.
The lying they do penetrates into things people outside of the country don’t see like biology textbooks, history, economics, music… they’re repurposing everything for nationalistic purposes. Godwin be damned, that’s exactly the same kind of shit the Nazis did when they were beginning their disinformation propaganda war to prop up the myth of an Aryan super race.
Any foreigner who says anything negative about the regime gets drowned out by their army of online trolls. Then they get paved over with links and redirection to their army of paid shills that receive backchannel funding and indirect traffic manipulation all the fuck over Youtube right now. If a parent company like CNN prints anything that could be twisted to incite nationalistic hate they sound the alarm as loud as possible and then organize mobs of “concerned citizens” to surround and harass targeted members of the foreign press.
The PRC CCP media control campaign is 100x more advanced than it was 10 years ago. It’s in everything and all over everything. The reach of their media control apparatus is not as aggressive outside of their country but it’s growing in sophistication and willingness to intercede all the time.
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