1/Alright, you (might not have) asked for it: A thread on why anime is neoliberal.
2/Many have expressed skepticism of this idea, since many alt-right trolls use anime avatars - or at least used to.
But this is purely posturing. Rightists use the avatars ironically. Meanwhile, the anime industry in Japan has traditionally attracted more leftists.
3/But this is beside the point. Anime itself, as an institution, is clearly neoliberal.
The first (and simplest) reason is that anime is a global industry, bringing people together through shared enjoyment of products they consume.
4/The industry has also helped Japan diversify into services, and boosted its exports - both monetary and cultural. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
5/Anime often depicts explicitly globalist themes - characters with names and appearances implying that they're from all over the world, themes of international cooperation and peace, etc.
6/The most neoliberal anime is probably Cowboy Bebop, which depicts a hardy band of entrepreneurs trying to make it in a fully globalized, capitalist future.
7/But the ultimate reason that anime is neoliberal, as I see it, is something more subtle.
Anime depicts thriving technological civilizations that are *explicitly nonwhite*, and not associated with the colonial legacy of Old Europe.
8/Perhaps the central idea of neoliberalism - at least the left-leaning 1990s version rather than the reactionary-libertarian 1980s version - is that global trade and a mixed economy can make the developing world rich. bradford-delong.com/2018/12/delong…
9/Since decolonization in the mid-20th century, we've seen a remarkable flowering of industry, technology, and mixed-economy prosperity, especially in Asia but also increasingly in Africa.
10/As a side note, If I were waxing philosophical, I'd point out that Japan was the first country to explode the idea that European countries were the world's natural masters, when they won the Russo-Japanese War...but perhaps that takes us too far afield. history.com/topics/korea/r…
11/In any case, to bring us back to the point, anime is a force that brings together people from every background, and every country, to celebrate fun stuff that they like.
Which is, ultimately, the whole point of globalism.
12/The world neoliberalism has created has a great many problems, and we need to fix those problems. The solutions won't always be neoliberal ones, either.
But in the meantime, enjoy some anime.
(end)
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Feel like Blu*sky is a microcosm for all of American liberalism right now. The entire left-of-center became defined by cancel culture. Now the spaces where that culture exists are shrinking under external attack, but everyone on the left just stays within those shrinking spaces.
There was this big idea that social media was this infinitely powerful tool that allowed a small # of progressives to shame a huge number of Americans into accepting their values. For a decade it seemed to be working. But it overreached and collapsed.
But progressives got addicted to that seemingly infinite power. They forgot everything else. They forgot how to persuade. They forgot how to organize. They forgot how to compromise. They thought the only tool they would ever need again was heckling and shunning on social media.
2/Most of the discourse around China in Western media these days is about U.S.-China competition (e.g. this podcast by @DKThomp and @RushDoshi). But I thought I'd write about something a little more positive -- the idea that China is building The Future.
2/After Covid, there was a general sense that America needed to be REBUILT -- not just from the pandemic, but from the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Rust Belt, and decades of institutional decay.
3/People argued about HOW to rebuild America. Naturally, progressives thought it would be more government-directed, while conservatives thought it would come from the private sector and from defense spending.
This is a very subtle and interesting question. It seems clear that right-wing interest in personal health is a response to the terrible health of non-college Americans. And the rightists are trying to invent an alternative approach that resists the hegemony of academia.
The fact is, college-educated Americans tend to be hypocritical about health. They watch what they eat, get lots of exercise, and try to eat "organic", but they preach fat acceptance and a disability-based approach to poor health. Rightists don't know how to deal with that.
In fact, this is representative of a broader pattern. College-educated progressives get married and stay marriage, but denigrate the idea of marriage. They work hard but denigrate the idea of hard work. Their personal success is based on rampant, galloping hypocrisy.
1/Here's something a lot of people I talk to don't understand about Japanese urbanism, and why Japanese cities are so special.
2/Japanese cities feel different than big, dense cities elsewhere -- NYC, London, and Paris, but also other Asian cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore.
There are many reasons for this, but today I'll focus on one: Zakkyo buildings.
3/When many people think of "mixed-use development", they think of stores on the first floor, apartments on the higher floors. This is sometimes called "shop-top housing" or "over-store apartments".
This is how most cities in the world do mixed-use development.