BF2S Forums Presidential Election 2016

Larssen wrote:

uziq wrote:

and ... no. you, the policy-wonk who loves acronyms and exotic ancient greek loan words to add an air of intellectualism to your piffling paper-shuffling, accusing me of laboured writing? LMAO.

Correctly using a well-known term in historiography = 'using exotic ancient greek loan words to add an air of intellectualism to your paper shuffling'

Every day the irony is stronger with you. You accusing someone else of using 'exotic language' to obscure their writing. I believe pretty much everyone who's posted here has a thing or two to say on that.

it really isn't my problem that i know what an episteme is and you only know how to use it in one specific context, which is itself an unorthodox use of the term, like all things foucault did (that's rather why he's remembered). you are a yokel grasping at fancy words without any of the background learning. i'm sure it impresses the other pencil-pushers in your endless and interminable policy meetings.

and, once again, since you seem to have totally missed my original point in raising it: i mentioned it because you were seemingly totally unable to appreciate why your concerns over china's domestic policies hardly register at all in the minds of your average chinese. you're stuck in western-liberal thinking expecting people to behave and react as if they were oppressed western liberals and not chinese subjects.

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-20 05:23:27)

i lament the direction the UK is going in, i.e. more neoliberalism, more free-market, more aligned with the US than the EU.

i would not be lamenting leaving the EU if we did so to pursue a fairer socio-economic system, something which the EU seems to be pretty good at stymieing when banks are at risk or the EU's stability is threatened. i have no problem with the idea of small, independent social democracies. norway being an obvious example of someone who got a very Good Deal, much to the envy of everyone else. i'd welcome an independent scotland on the same grounds. good luck to them.

there are not specific uzique rules. are you fucking retarded? you got all cocky and lambasted me first for 'not using episteme' correctly, and then cited your own idiosyncratic definition of it having to do with history. it doesn't. go and re-read your post again when you decided to go down this pedantic path, lecturing me. you look very, very stupid. you have since backtracked entirely to say 'i was using it correctly in the context of my seminar and IR education'. well, don't bash me over the head with your limited professional usages. 'uzique rules'. right, ok. that's one way to label the way episteme has been used in philosophy since 500 BC. btw nobody on a literature course studies plato and aristotle in any depth. i thought you were the one taking ancient greek at 10?

you tried to give me a 'dose of my own medicine', over-extended yourself, and looked very silly. it's okay. there are other hills to die on rather than ancient greek epistemology.

being a smug bureaucrat and being a yokel grasping at terms above his ken are not mutually exclusive. bureaucrats are surely one of the main culprits of abusing language and jargon in order to cloak their often hollow and foolish ideas.

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-20 05:48:26)

Guys, you're both idiots.

uziq wrote:

ok bro but like i said, 'anachronism' is a better term than 'episteme' in that context.

Lol what the fuck you have got to be trolling.

I never once pretended that my interpretation of Chinese governance was some form of objective truth. Grasping at straws again. Just give it a rest, you're gonna have to accept I know what I'm talking about.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Guys, you're both idiots.

Don't lump me in with this repulsive person

Last edited by Larssen (2020-05-20 06:33:03)

Dilbert_X wrote:

Guys, you're both idiots.

the self-immolation of tibetans doesn't get far very. there is simply a communication clampdown on most of the news. the dramatic images of monks burning themselves in vietnam, which were so impactful to western audiences wracked by guilt over the war, does not apply in this case study. most people never see the pictures. monks have been self-immolating for a long time.

as for key significance ... again, not really. china are rebuilding a silkroad, as well as ports in pakistan/burma, etc. to say nothing of their expansion in africa. i don't think they are going to be pushed to the limit by the mongolians any time soon. besides, what makes you think the resistance of a tiny fraction of the population are going to stop them repossessing land and resources? remind me what happened with the three gorges dam, again?

I also think you confuse confidence in leadership with happiness, but I digress.

yes, let me know when there's a directly measurable metric of happiness and sadness. are you a scientologist? for most of the world, and most of societies throughout history, being materially affluent and promised future prospects of more affluence tends to keep the people schtum and satisfied.

thanks for the pet psychology. try again!

i don't spellcheck work by the way. or read marx. or mainly correspond via email. or any of those things, really. also the image of me applying for a bureaucrat job is very funny. i don't know how new you actually are here, but i like drugs and partying. i am not missing out on a job in the home office. very inaccurate! stay salty, baby! btw the timaeus is really short, you could re-read it in an afternoon. just sayin'!

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-20 09:54:48)

I don't see any monks setting themselves on fire in the Schumann square in Brussels.

jesus fucking christ, my remarks about you not getting outside of your western 'episteme' have simply got nowhere. you're still directly comparing all these 'issues' from a western perspective, imagining the impacts it would have on a western, liberal imagination. you simply do not understand that, as with the hong kong protestors, the average chinese person sees this and conceives of them as a nuisance and a threat to the established peace and stability, which they guard as their topmost priority. NOT as a westerner sees it.

i am downplaying those events. i am not condoning them, i just don't think something as big as the chinese state is going to come unstuck over tibet. unpopular with the world? sure. thought less of by its trading partners? sure. decried by global organizations? sure. but not undermined. china will maybe someday relent over tibet when they damn well feel like it. it isn't going to precipitate any crisis in their country.

coltan in phones and laptops? you mean that stuff from west africa? why do you think china has been playing the long-game on the african continent all along? do you really think they won't be able to access valuable rare earth minerals via trade or coercion? o k. we'll see how that one pans out.

for every nation's afghanistan, there's a chechnya. we'll see how that pans out.

regardless of your prognostications, my point all along is that they are overwhelmingly satisfied with their government. rampant inequality, environmental pollution, destruction of habitat, scarcity of resources, etc. are all negotiatable within the framework of the CCP. all of those things are very real issues to chinese society on a socio-economic level, yes, but it doesn't follow that they are getting rid of turbo-charged 'state-capitalism' any time soon. wishful thinking on your part all along.

i didn't do coursework in epistemology. i did a literature degree. it's just common knowledge for anyone with a humanities background. i'm sorry you missed out. this whole episteme episode is really regrettable. i think less of you. and that jejune stuff about rorty and having 'enriching conversations with an actual chinese'! oh really it's too much. too cringe-making. you are a funny one.

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-20 10:24:36)

i do like rorty. but it's just funny the way you talk about 'encouraging an "edifying conversation" with an actual chinese'. then 5 pages ago you were mocking me for, er, having had conversations with actual chinese people. go figure. i guess it's more noble and in a more disinterested, elevated liberal spirit when you do it. because you've read rorty and can call it *checks notes* an edifying conversation. me, i call it going for drinks with someone and having a chat.

i have heard of the narcissism of small differences. it's from freud. interesting to apply it to wars and not, say, rivalries between villagers in different valleys, as his original example spoke of. a bit of a stretch. but we're used to your creative interpretation of things, i guess. the idea being that people with more in common with one another than not tend to exaggerate what small differences there are.

so, er, sure, small differences between the kosovans and bosnians and serbs. those people with different religions, cultures, and a 1,000 year history of bloodshed (who were ironically forced together into peace by an authoritarian communist regime, like the CCP and its own minority groups). it was an ethnic conflict and featured ethnic cleansing, sorry about that. the serbian state broadcaster re-played medieval history films fantasizing about their legendary defeat and humiliation to the muslim hordes. the croats changed their national flag and military insignia to the same design featured on their nazi-ally era emblems. there were echoes of world war 2 and people being rounded up. lots of scores were settled. it was conflict in many ways demarcated along ethnic divisions.

it's literally amazing that you'll bring up yugoslavia to score points. a region where people routinely are nostalgic for communism and tito, because he 'kept the nation together and kept the peace'. and here's me saying that, yes, there are minorities in china, but everyone there is happy with the repression because it ... ensures the peace and prosperity of the country. amazing! fuck me what an own goal on your part. i'm sure the chinese can't wait to turn the streets of shanghai into sniper alleys a la sarajevo.

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-20 10:40:39)

oh yes, sure, the liberal view of history that 'ethnicity' doesn't exist at all and is an imperialist construct. great. rwanda wasn't a genocide! it was a war crime ... perpetrated by germany and belgium!

whether or not it was 'seeded' there exogeneously, the fact is that milosevic still played to serbian identity. as did the croats. there were paramilitary death squads going around hunting people in villages from the 'other side' and killing all the men. that is ethnic cleansing. same as what happened with turkey/greece in cyprus. will you tell me that wasn't ethnic either?

talk about academic pedantry, denying that people kill one another over their self-identified groups because 'ethnicity is a construct'.

i refer you to the 6-hour film by norma percy, 'the death of yugoslavia'. it features every single leader and military actor in the conflict talking, on tape, about their ethnicity. to claim that it was about something else to what they profess in bad faith, i.e. strategy or material, is very, errr, marxist of you.

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-20 10:49:31)

that's cute, sounds like the start of an essay, but people still get the idea into their heads that they are fulfilling some revenge for the historical humiliation of 'their people' and go around slitting the throats of people who worship a different god and have different customs. people acting in bad faith or not, that's really what happened. these forces, once unleashed, have their own momentum. here's some other freud for you: the death drive. have you heard of it?



do i need to dig up milosevic's famous speech to the serbian workers when he announced that 'they would not allow it anymore', and show how that was framed from the outset in ethnic and nationalist terms, too?

and you still haven't even joined up the dots and got around to your piece-de-resistance:

it's literally amazing that you'll bring up yugoslavia to score points. a region where people routinely are nostalgic for communism and tito, because he 'kept the nation together and kept the peace'. and here's me saying that, yes, there are minorities in china, but everyone there is happy with the repression because it ... ensures the peace and prosperity of the country. amazing! fuck me what an own goal on your part. i'm sure the chinese can't wait to turn the streets of shanghai into sniper alleys a la sarajevo.

yugoslavia, a region of dozens of different ethnic groups, languages, religions, cultures, all coexisting peacefully under Tito. its greatest period of development and prosperity. it was even a top tourist destination ffs. and a region that devolved into chaos and bloodshed after the fall of communism. people there are nostalgic for the times of communism and tito; it's seen as a golden age. meanwhile you keep saying that the chinese state has a serious problem in the way it treats minorities. lmao. BONGGGGG

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-20 11:02:36)

you do know that that article was broadly marxist, right? ascribing everything to economic or material inequalities is ur-marxian analysis. sure, if you want to go with that line. it works for me. i would also say that ideology plays a huge part, what later post-marxists like althusser called 'interpellation'. people get ideas in their heads that are very potent and inspire action. it's not all reducible to 'material factors'. sometimes people even behave perversely, in spite of those same material factors. the logic is not at all simple (technically this pivots on a debate in marxism about hegel's dialectic, and whether ideas inspire action or material; hegel, idealist that he was, leads that it's ideas/ideology that lead History).

once a state becomes unstable, you unleash all sorts of forces in the populace. ethnic cleansing happened in yugoslavia. for you to say it wasn't an 'ethnic war' is really just the pedantry you've been complaining about. what were the scorpions? serbian paramilitary units going around to villages and killing all the men? what about all the war crimes committed by the serbian military? which had little strategic significance? it was motivated by ideology as much as by 'root causes' or 'material factors'.

on the contrary, minority groups are afforded legal protection in china. they are not causing rifts at all. people are encouraged to identify as chinese and with the success of china. it's really not so different from tito's yugoslavia. i can't help but think you've really muddied your own argument by raising yugoslavia, here, a scenario that in almost every way reflects better on communism/Tito than anything else. it was the biggest war on the european continent since ww2 and saw the return of ugly ethnic cleansing all over again. it's not really a great advertisement for privileging minority identity groups over the stability and peace of the nation. as i've said, time and time again, the chinese fear a return to such violence and civil strife. they are happy to see minorities encouraged to embrace their legal status as 'equal chinese'.

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-20 11:16:55)

sure, i agree that war is war and by the time the civil processes in a society slide to that level, labels can obfuscate as much as define. but ethnic tensions were a huge factor in the post-yugoslavia scrabble for dominance, whether first causes or salad dressing, there’s no getting around it.

you can analyse any civil conflict and conclude that ultimately it’s down to the uneven distribution of wealth, poor resource allocation, lack of representation, etc. that works. but i mean, it also ignores the fact that people go around in their day-to-day lives thinking on the level of ideological superstructure, as reified subjects, not constantly scrutinising everything through historical materialist analysis. people martyr themselves and massacre others all over the world for reasons that could be categorised as ‘bad faith’. i’m not sure how helpful it is to reduce everything in this way.  what do you achieve by trying to deny that ethnicity was a potent force? i’m pretty sure even the karadzic’s and mladic’s would disagree with you there.  those peoples had been blood feuding as neighbours for generations. many of the origins of grievance were likely lost in the mists of time.

i simply think that, thus far at least, the authoritarian strain of capitalism that china has adopted looks to be extremely robust and resilient. it has adapted and mutated with the times. it evidently is better than our version in some ways, such as in crisis response and mass mobilisation (or lockdown). it might even be better at pivoting to green energy, should that day come, and extricating its industry/economy from fossil fuels. when it comes to rising inequalities and other social ills, it might be able to address that better than widespread liberation or democracy could. evidently these inequalities can boil over into outright warfare if not managed properly. yugoslavia is a pretty good example of how not to transition away from centralised authority to ‘democracy’.

similarly, the notion that people are inherently unhappy in these states that don’t privilege identity is flawed. it’s a western optics problem. we see it in russia and in yugoslavia. people are nostalgic for the communist empires, when identities were shelved and some other basis for communal life took its place. i really think you are struggling to sympathise with this point, this ‘episteme’. what marxist theory would go into as ‘the Subject’ and how individuality/subjectivity is constructed from the psychological up. their notion of themselves and of their nation are quite radically different. westerners scoff at the idea of nostalgia for crumbled communism; but it’s really a thing. and the chinese thus far show no signs of longing for western-individualism or fighting for the rights of minorities.

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-20 11:39:18)