The foundation of Americans' self-esteem is their feeling of superiority. Other than that, there cannot be another force that is capable of uniting all of those ethnic groups together, all having vastly different beliefs and ethnic characteristics. As soon as the feeling of superiority vanishes, America will be reduced to an incoherent hodgepodge, during which time no group is willing to succumb to other groups and everyone will account their own failure to others' mistakes.
This is uncomfortably perceptive.
The round-eyed hairy white people are still very arrogant + ignorant.
This sounds like dialogue from a Tom Clancy novel.
1: I think there are some problems with an analysis that implies the only reason the US was able to become so powerful was the remarkable degree of unity among its various ethnic groups.
I remember seeing a comment somewhere that Americans read Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother and thought that Amy Chua was unbelievably strict while Chinese people read it as making an argument for being willing to be flexible and accommodating when necessary.
As the comments at that link make clear that's an (incorrect) over generalization, but still an interesting claim.
Another website in a similar vein, though not so focused on politics: China Smack. I like this one.
Yeah, the interesting thing for me is how rarely the comments are driven by ethnic stereotyping. The low density of pejorative remarks in the subway thread was nice. I don't know how much filtering the translators are doing.
1) as long as we are trading links
2) having just escaped another hundreds comment thread at Crooked Timber about Nozick and Rand,
3) reading this morning that Nausee (etc) had spent months on the Japanese best-seller list after WWII
4) I googled "post-structuralism chinese" and got This Site with many translated papers downloadable in pdf. Yumm.
Lord, I hate living in a primitive backwater made violently ignorant by decades of superstitious propaganda, obcurantist pseudo-science, and a reactionary servile academy. Thank you, internet
Damn. Sorry Apparently the papers are gated or something. Unavailable. Damn intellectual propertarians.
I liked
[The people] blindly accepts the China threat theory invented by the the owners behind corporate media. It's just like a gamecock involuntarily harboring hatred towards other gamecocks, completely unware of the fact that they are being manipulated. They are totally unaware of the presence of the conspiring manipulators who engineered this whole cockfighting show.Although I'm not sure how much it relates to the Tiger Mom story in particular.
Sort of off-topic, but I think this is an interesting story. Basically this guy, who writes about defense issues, was blocked by the great firewall. Except that actually someone in Hong Kong was stealing his content, translating it, and posting it on the other side, where it was earning money from advertising. And so people in China were reading it -- supposedly 6000 hits per day -- and they were commenting, but it was a totally separate forum: they couldn't see him, and he couldn't see them. Weird, huh?