Can’t lie, I was initially sucked into a few of his videos when it seems he got a huge push in the Youtube algo. I started seeing major red flags when he attributed every country’s entire motivation to religion. For, at least supposedly, teaching in China, I was thinking some kind of class analysis would come into play, even if he didn’t align with the CPC. But no, he doesn’t touch on capital or class at all. The world in his eyes is driven completely by individual psychology and religious beliefs.
He went on a strange rant in one video about how he believes our ability to think is inexplicable in a purely material world view, and how he believes he gets his writing ideas from a higher power.
We should be able to understand why someone’s position is wrong regardless of whether they are an intelligence asset or not, or whether they will be recruited to one in the future.
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9818961/7340383
He is wrong because his analysis is wrong. Western intelligence organisations spend money on propaganda partly to help define the acceptable political spectrum socially as a license to align with imperialism; brainwashing ain’t a thing, whether said intelligence service understands or not:
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
This guy is wrong because he has a pseudo-scientific perspective but so do most western historians, political analysts and economists; and most of our media whether that be news or entertainment. They all lean heavily on idealist metaphysical understandings of reality. Even western science has to fight tooth and nail inadvertently against the positivism deeply ingrained in acadaemia.
We have to understand what the kernel of truth is from our enemies so it can be a tool we can use for own ends. We live in this liberal world where the bourgoisie overwhelming dictates what information we have access to and how it is presented. It is from their seeds their destruction is formed.
What is positivism? I keep looking at the descriptions I get when I look it up and I don’t really get it.
Positivism is a deflationary view that one should only believe in things that are either tautologically true or derived a posteriori from empirical observation. To be “deflationary” means it subtracts away beliefs that are not absolutely necessary to make sense of what we observe.
Mach, famously, did not believe atoms existed, because in his time, no one had yet developed an electron microscope that could actually see atoms. He thus saw atoms as a metaphysical construct used to explain the results of experiments, but since we could not directly observe them, we did not need to commit to a belief that they literally definitely existed.
The main issue with positivism, in my view, is that it is a bit too deflationary. If you take it seriously, you basically have to adopt a kind of solipsistic stance, because I cannot observe what you observe, so I have to assume your point of view doesn’t exist, and if I am not looking at something, well, by definition I cannot observe it, so I also have to deny that things even can be said to have existence at all in any sense when I am not looking.
This is a critique that many dialectical materialists have of positivism. Dialectical materialism is sometimes viewed as positivist since dialectical materialist authors love to rail against the “metaphysicians” and engage in deflationary rhetoric. But it’s not really positivist because dialectical materialists always have defended that at least some metaphysics is necessary to make sense of the world, but they just always caution to use it very sparingly.
Crudely speaking, positvism is that measurement = understanding.
That facts and sciences are “neutral” from the society that produces them and it devalues systems thinking. It atomises and isolates variables. Consider for example racial science such as skull measurements to assess intelligence, or IQ currently, or genetics for biological determinism etc.
To begin with it may be worthwile looking at the arguments against Karl Popper’s positvism (eg falsefiability) and how quantum physics proves positvism is not correct (while doing so you will also discover where positvists also claim that quantum physics backs them up!).
Then it may be worthwile doing a deep dive into dialectical materialism:
In addition to my last answer I realised I didn’t go into positivism with the context of history/historiography (ie regarding OP article’s subject): it would be relaying events/facts about history without understanding the explanatory power behind it all.
You will often see this where a historian (outside of the academic discpline, and even within it) explain historical events as the decisions of “great” men/women (ie igorning the masses and systems that allows these “great” people to come into a poisiton of power and allowing them to take the actions they do, and ignoring the weight of systems or masses of peoples in the direction of history ie class struggles) or the serendipity/randomness of events.
The above is the equivalent of recognising brownian motion of individual particles in a fluid (ie individual “random” movements) and then not considering diffusion or osmosis ie a direction of entropy.
It is the denunciation effectively of the science of history, historical materialism, and taking an idealistic metaphysical non-scientifc perspective instead.
Ie as noted in my previous comment - positivism could be considered “measurement” = understanding; taking historical events (assuming what being relayed is true) and then not recognising the interconnectedness of systems when you zoom out.
Being a dialectical materialist, however does not mean there is no obejctive reality - we are not idealists - but recognising that objectivity includes the relationships between things and not assuming understanding something by removing it from its fullest context.
Hope that helps.
The man is a grifter. He has a BA in English literature (writing as entertainment and art) and then paints himself as a Geo-political analyst and historian using game theory. He uses the rules to telling stories and the “history” he picked up reading fiction to tell stories. That is not “prediction.” The guy is an expert on romeo and juliet.
But I don’t think he is CIA. I think he is backed by Chinese intelligence. They get him out there to entrench ignorance in English speaking people. Can you imagine 20 years from now when the entire american state department has grown up watching this grifters slop? He doesn’t post videos in Chinese so he isn’t poisoning their youth.
The man is a grifter. He has a BA in English literature (writing as entertainment and art) and then paints himself as a Geo-political analyst and historian using game theory.
He may well be a grifter but a similar argument was/is used against Grover Furr.
Grover Furr wasn’t claiming to predict the future. He had a PhD in Medieval Literature which is history adjacent and his work followed standard practices in historical academia he just didn’t cite a wide range of sources.
Jiang makes claims about the future with no citations. His methodology is 100% “trust me bro.”
Sure but I meant along the lines that a person’s formal qualifications does not exclude them from expertise.
Lmao that article he wrote contains all the buzzwords you’d expect from a groomed lib, L china for not purging the guy.
The obligatory glazing of America for press freedom really put the icing on the cake lol
L china for not purging the guy.
He doesn’t spread his bullshit in Chinese so what do they care?
but he is teaching in china.
I don’t think he is. With all the interviews and videos on youtube he is doing he doesn’t have a full time job. When he did teach he was teaching Highschool level english liturature and western philosophy. Then he got shuffled over into administrative roles.
Is there any good explanation avaiable for why exactly does China allow so much western theory to be imported from abroad?
Apparently Zizek and the likes are quite popular in China too, is that true, like can you generally find his books translated in Chinese in libraries/bookstores? What about someone like Ayn Rand?
What benefits do they see from allowing this teacher to do what he’s doing? Do they want to stop this, but they can’t, they think it’s too risky? Or are they so busy managing all this mess happening around them they have no time to legislate anything against this, (this falls out of priority list at the moment)?
Probably because they are not worried that these fringe ideologies will ever become relevant, given that they are largely disconnected from the lived reality of people in China. Ideologies tend to find fertile ground when they are rooted in existing material conditions. When they lack that, they don’t usually penetrate into the broader masses. These aren’t political mass movements or dangerous cults like Falun Gong, it’s pseudo-intellectual nerd shit, appealing only to a small minority of people who are very into politics and philosophy.
Also, banning them could have the opposite effect of increasing their popularity by turning them into something “forbidden” and therefore tempting. People tend to want that which they cannot have, and assume that the fact that it is denied to them indicates that it is something desirable and good.
Lets say you are in the running for greatest boxer alive. Do you avoid fighting other people because they might threaten you? no, You let them all come and you beat the fuck out of every dumb ass who thinks they can take you.
Marxism is scientific truth and fears no criticism. If it did, and if it could be overthrown by criticism, it would be worthless. In fact, aren’t the idealists criticizing Marxism every day and in every way? And those who harbour bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas and do not wish to change — aren’t they also criticizing Marxism in every way? Marxists should not be afraid of criticism from any quarter. Quite the contrary, they need to temper and develop themselves and win new positions in the teeth of criticism and in the storm and stress of struggle. Fighting against wrong ideas is like being vaccinated — a man develops greater immunity from disease as a result of vaccination.
-Mao’s On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
This is an interesting point. All I have to add is, I’m sure it makes a difference for a project like China’s whether a position is coming from an organization or from an individual and whether the organization is trying to gain political power. In general, it would probably be impractical to try to micromanage this kind of thing in the general populace and is more in line with fictional anti-communist representations of socialist states as scary and repressive.
The thing that gave me pause and what led me to making this comment is I was thinking about China’s efforts in the “great firewall” and sovereign tech and all. But it’s like… is that even about “keeping out bad ideas”? Or is it mainly about ensuring political power is in the hands of the vanguard party digitally as well as physically, which also happens to be tied up in preventing the western empire from doing digital propaganda warfare like they do to countries that don’t have sovereign tech.
Chinese people who read political/ideological theory have been educated in Dialectical Materialism and Anti-imperialism to some degree which will inoculate them against western “Marxists” or other political theory. Like how no westerners first novel is War and Peace nobody in China is starting their political theory education with zizec.
The great firewall protects non-political people from being inundated with reactionary political ideas.
Okay that makes sense. I think I am starting to get a better idea here.
and I suppose it would be quite challenging for me to grasp because the liberals in charge over here care a lot about what people think and don’t welcome critique.
Material always before the idea:
