Conversation

They ran a low-tech version of this playbook in Tibet in the 50s. That erasure feels pretty complete now. Tibet is like some mix of history and dated fashion now. Fading along with Richard Gere. The refugees in India are basically 3rd gen immigrants with no live ties.
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Anyone who thinks China represents an alternative future for the world is indulging in pure wishful thinking. They are merely reproducing the worst of the West’s past, with better technology, and bigger bribes for the rest of the world to just look away.
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Did China ever have anything like even a brief historical period of liberal pluralism and open intellectual culture? This civilizational insistence on stability by any means necessary seems kinda insane. Especially for such a huge population.
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I sometimes think China is 1.5 billion people trapped by a shared language, while India is 1.2 billion people protected by the lack of one. There’s a strong correlation between linguistic monocultures and repressive polities.
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a great majority of the founders and early leaders of the CCP were intellectuals either from the elite class (confucian education) or the working class (university education). could it be said they were all aesthetes ?
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Sounds like you've reduced complex personality traits to a simplistic hacker-aesthete distinction, or something like that.