+1e9, should be the top answer IMO. Activities create a group of people with a common interest, meeting regularly. You have a ready supply of people with something in common, you meet them regularly enough to create a bond, and easy ways to engage with them outside of class ("hey people who attend activity X, shall we do some activity X outside of classes?").
If you're not very sporty, less sporty things include:
- photography
- dancing classes (esp if you're a man, IME they are usually in short supply for classes)
- hiking / walking groups
- book clubs / chess / bridge
- quirky sports like roller skating
Otherwise, what other say. Other people like being listened to (and their interlocutor remembering what you said to them), that's an accessible trick to bond with people. And finally, it sounds like you don't struggle to build acquaintances - so maybe the tricky bit is "converting" them into friendships.
I'd say, in case it makes you feel better, that this is very much the common experience, to varying degrees, and the cult of people having lots and lots of friends is, for most, commercial propaganda.
As often as not, these days, when someone online criticizes the West, it's for something absurd (eg: Churchill interfering with Hitler's continental invasions, or America using the word 'regime' when discussing Iran). Obviously, other times the criticism is wholly justified.
What "dominant Western narratives" apply here? I'm not going to bicker. I'm just curious.
Not OP, but one example could perhaps be American Prometheus and the Oppenheimer film. I would consider them "dominant Western narratives" about the origin of the nuclear bomb.
And like the person said, there is nothing inherently wrong with such a narrative. Like them I'm also curious about non-western narratives.
If most groups, cultures, religions, countries were more curious about "non-native" stories, maybe we'd all be a bit more open-minded and understanding.
I think Oppenheimer is pretty fair as it goes. It's pretty clear with it being the US perspective and they give credit to the other countries that they have good scientists that will figure the thing out (and they did). I think for exposing a man's experience, it's quite good. What makes me wrong? (An honest invitation to illuminate me)
The last paragraph is true, but up to the point where one becomes a useful idiot for a totalitarian state. I don't mean you, but on social media there are quite a few people like that.
What exactly are you advocating? You seem to be going back to Cold War logic.
Your initial assertion that people online criticizing the West are "often" criticizing "absurd" things is simultaneously wrong and condescending, some sort of thought-terminating cliché.
The lessons of the Cold War, a substantial duration of which I lived through, should not include "actually the American system and the Soviet system were equally bad".
The term "useful idiot" has no expiration date, and is more relevant now, in the age of social media, than ever. The world's major powers still attempt to propagandize their rivals.
> The lessons of the Cold War [...] should not include "actually the American system and the Soviet system were equally bad"
I was arguing that the Cold War, a substantial duration of which I also lived through, introduced a mistrustful "us vs them" kind of thinking that is harmful. The Soviet system is no longer relevant, and unfortunately "the end of history" didn't happen as Fukuyama predicted. What matters today are the successes but also the failings, lies, and fabrications of the systems that endured, and it's not all China.
Cold War mentality is what makes you (specifically you, in this context) mistrustful of any narratives not dictated by your country. So when someone else, as in this thread, praised an article for showing points of views other than the dominant narrative [1], you instantly questioned what the user meant, out of suspicion. You cannot deny it was suspicion, because in other comments you clarified what kind of "criticism of the West" you meant (and tellingly, you equated listening to other narratives to criticism of the West!): that "as often as not" it's "absurd" whining about Churchill or about the term "Iranian regime", or (in another comment) claiming that "China is freer than the US".
> The term "useful idiot" has no expiration date
As long as you acknowledge it's a term of propaganda. It has no value today other than as a relic of the Cold War past.
I hope you're not trying to use it as a thought-terminating cliché to criticize anyone who wants to say something about China that doesn't belong with the usual tropes.
> The world's major powers still attempt to propagandize their rivals.
Yes, though we would likely disagree about which is the major world power more likely to engage in this tactic today.
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[1] what's even more puzzling is that I think TFA actually shows the same point of view as the Western narrative: China doing China things, secrecy, military projects, enclosed towns, executions. This wouldn't feel surprising or novel to an English-speaking reader, it would just confirm what they already thought of China!
Short generalised answer; I grew up in Europe. The dominant media was of course Western media, more specifically American media, think Hollywood and Silicon Valley. It is extremely difficult to break out of that bubble.
You picked a very fringe and bizarre belief (I honestly never read anything even remotely paraphrasing what you just typed) and made it seem so common that "as often as not" this is what people claim when they criticize the West.
It reeks of dishonesty. This isn't defending "Liberal democracy" as you claimed in another comment, it's attacking dissenting opinions by picking (or creating) the worst, most bizarre argument possible and presenting it as the norm.
With respect, you seem immediately to have started out on the war path, and since then have been arguing with some imagined opponent (is he modeled on the 'love it or leave it, Tommy' character in Born on the Fourth of July?).
Responding to your criticisms today - and hopefully you're just having an off day today - is a dull task. They show little engagement, aside from the fixation with small phrases like 'useful idiot', with what I actually write.
I wouldn't say "on the war path", but specifically about your dismissal of other narratives than the dominant one. I engaged you after I read more replies by you that confirmed my suspicions about your initial question.
It's not just about the term "useful idiot"; if you're being honest you'll admit you stated more things, including a bizarre strawman about people arguing "China is freer than the US". Do you deny this?
In another comment I went into more detail, but I guess if you're comfortable deflecting and claiming "you can't be bothered" that's ok.
There's no need to be defensive. We are largely westerners on a western website studying history from a western perspective. There's nothing wrong with that, it's natural. It just means we lose some understanding of events if that's the only side we know. OP is performing a service by documenting first-person history, and doesn't need to justify why it's important. It's important.
To be fair, my father in law who is Chinese and had to exile himself during the cultural revolution would pretty much say the same thing about the Cultural Revolution. Educated people in China who lived through it will certainly criticise the Cultural Revolution (or The Great Leap Forward for that matter) if they are in a situation when they can be honest about it.
So I'm not sure that specific comment would be considered to be a "dominant western narrative" unless you're going to tell me that older (and so who have lived through it) educated people in China who don't speak a word of English have a western mindset because they're educated.
Oh the fact that there has been some positives from the cultural revolution (by having educated people sent to the farm and rural area) doesn't stop the fact that the cultural revolution was a net negative for the country. How many works of arts have been destroyed due to it? How many people suffered?
Nothing is ever white or black but it doesn't mean that we can take a small positive outcome and use that to justify atrocities.
The fact that you immediately think you know what the author I referenced has written and continue to plow forward with your pre-established conclusions is evidence of the “dominant western narrative” effect.
Accounts from well-off diaspora of any country will always be negative. It’s a self-selecting group with specific interests.
I mean I skimmed it earlier but I do plan to read it. That said my pre-established conclusions are based on first hand negative accounts of people who currently still live in China some of which do not speak English so weren't influenced by any "western narrative" (where I also lived for a number of years before moving to HK). Those are not accounts from a well-off diaspora.
EDIT: By the way, it's not that hard either to find books written by Chinese writers not part of the diaspora that are critical of the cultural revolution (Serve the people by Yan Lianke, 3 body problem by Liu Cixin) or the great leap forward (4 books by Yan Lianke). Obviously, writers living in China that have to deal with censorship tend to be less directly critical of it compared to writers from the diaspora but that doesn't stop some criticism to shine through.a
Even the official CPC line is critical of Mao. The assertion is not that all Chinese people believe the same thing or all necessarily belief different things from dominant western narratives on every issue. The assertion is simply that: some narratives are dominant in the West and treated as closed issues without any room for critical discussion or nuance. Deviating from those narratives is punished in a variety of ways through social and institutional enforcement.
This is extremely manipulative. The only reasons to say something like this are to shame the person you're respond to and/or attack and discredit them and force them to respond defensively. Don't do this.
(it also immediately outs you as not having any valid points to make, because someone with a reasonable response doesn't need to stoop to emotional attacks)
Absolutely, and Cook-era Macs remind me of that frequently.
For example, my last Mac was a Cook-era machine with two third-party displays. Its normal boot process is a visual atrocity: the screens repeatedly blank off and on, the progress bar jumps arbitrarily to new positions and dimensions on the screen, the log-in window animation has drawing quirks...
...when I watch this orgy of complacent design, I often dream of what would happen had the Apple DRI presented it to Steve Jobs.
If Chomsky were known only as a mathematician and computer scientist, then my view of him would be favorable for the reasons you note. His formal grammars are good models for languages that machines can easily use, and that many humans can use with modest effort (i.e., computer programming languages).
The problem is that they're weak models for the languages that humans prefer to use with each other (i.e., natural languages). He seems to have convinced enough academic linguists otherwise to doom most of that field to uselessness for his entire working life, while the useful approach moved to the CS department as NLP.
As to politics, I don't think it's hard to find critics of the West's atrocities with less history of denying or excusing the West's enemies' atrocities. He's certainly not always wrong, but he's a net unfortunate choice of figurehead.
I have the feeling we're focusing on different time periods.
Chomsky already was very active and well-known by 1960.
He pioneered areas in Computer Science, before Computer Science was a formal field, that we still use today.
His political views haven't changed much, but they were beneficial back when America was more naive. They are harmful now only because we suffer from an absurd excess of cynicism.*
How would you feel about Chomsky and his influence if we ignored everything past 1990 (two years after Manufacturing Consent)?
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* Just imagine if Nixon had been president in today's environment... the public would say "the tapes are a forgery!" or "why would I believe establishment shills like Woodward and Bernstein?" Too much skepticism is as bad as too little.
I wrote "when America was more naive" but that isn't entirely correct. Americans are more naive today in certain areas. If my comment weren't locked, I would change that sentence to something like "when Americans believed most of what they read in the newspaper"
I agree that his contributions to proto-computer-science were real and significant, though I think they're also overstated. Note the link to the Wikipedia page for BNF elsewhere in these comments. There's no evidence that Backus or Naur were aware of Chomsky's ideas vs. simply reinventing them, and Knuth argues that an ancient Indian Sanskrit grammarian deserves priority anyways.
I think Chomsky's political views were pretty terrible, especially before 1990. He spoke favorably of the Khmer Rouge. He dismissed "Murder of a Gentle Land", one of the first Western reports of their mass killing, as a "third rate propaganda tract". As the killing became impossible to completely deny, he downplayed its scale. Concern for human rights in distant lands tends to be a left-leaning concept in the West, but Chomsky's influence neutralized that here. This contributed significantly to the West's indifference, and the killing continued. (The Vietnamese communists ultimately stopped it.)
Anyone who thinks Chomsky had good political ideas should read the opinions of Westerners in Cambodia during that time. I'm not saying he didn't have other good ideas; but how many good ideas does it take to offset 1.5-2M deaths?
> Just imagine if Nixon had been president in today's environment... the public would say "the tapes are a forgery!" or "why would I believe establishment shills like Woodward and Bernstein?" Too much skepticism is as bad as too little.
Today it would not matter in the least if the president were understood to have covered up a conspiracy to break into the DNC headquarters. Much worse things have been dismissed or excused. Most of his party would approve of it and the rest would support him anyway so as not to damage "their side".
According to a possibly apocryphal story from the premiere performance, a woman was heard shouting that Ravel was mad. When told about this, Ravel is said to have remarked that she had understood the piece.
And, Ravel did eventually go mad. There's a lot of discussion about whether the recurring patterns in the song had something to do with his neurological condition.
“Initially, Ravel was to create a variation on the music of Isaac Albéniz, but copyright laws prevented him from doing so.” [your article]
“[Koji Kondo] had planned to use Maurice Ravel's Boléro as the title theme as it perfectly matched its speed, seeing as under Japanese copyright law, music is released into the public domain 50 years after the composer's death. However, Kondo was forced to change it in November 1985, late in the game's development, after learning that it had only been 47 years and 11 months after Ravel's death.”[1]
This happens in some school environments (eg: long-term group projects), many work environments, team sports, certain vacation environments, etc.
Join a language class, or a sports club, or find employment somewhere, or go on a hostel vacation.
Make sure it's something you want to do for its own sake - enough so that you're not obsessing over befriending people.
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