Thought I would follow @dylanleviking example and do a review of a Chinese movie pretty much no one has heard of, though a much more recent film. Was browsing youku and noticed a film called 无名狂 with a completely unrelated English title of Wild Swords. Im a big fan of Wuxia so
despite the trepidation of it being a web movie, i.e. a low budget cheesy affair similar to made for TV movies in the West which are generally shit, I watched it since the trailer at least looked interesting. Despite the unknown actors, limited budget, I was actually pleasantly
surprised by it. I was expecting to be disappointed because so few true Wuxia films are made today, but it was a competent if predictably executed film. The plot is your basic bloody revenge yarn between warring martial arts sect and it doesn't really stray from far away from
it replete with your stock archetypes; the murderous tranny, the carefree wanderer, the masked avenger, even the hapless escort agency destined to be slaughtered. The film is actually quite similar to Xu Haofengs martial arts films like the sword identity or judge archer, but
without the dry/bizarre humor, this is especially the case in the action choreography where the actual fight is over in seconds as well as the general texture and pacing of the film.
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Globalization as it was meant to happen was supposed to be Western firms exporting production to less developed countries but keeping ownership and knowledge so that it retained 95% of the profits while cutting costs in half, while simultaneously importing their best workers.
Fair enough trade for the very poor locations where production was relocated where even 5% was a very good deal and losing their brightest wasn't so much of a loss as their economies couldn't make productive use of them. Ridiculously good deal for the West though on paper. What
ended up happening in practice was something else entirely. Western firms did retain the lion's share of the profits in virtually every country they set up shop and didn't face any real competition except in one gigantic exception. Production in China resulted in the creation of
Western economists wondering why Chinese firms can have low profit margins and simultaneously be so competitive never stops being funny to me. Like they have magically forgotten the sina qua non of Capitalism which is that firms competing for profit maximizes overall welfare for
the greatest number of people possible. They operate under the parameters of American finance capitalism where the goal is to maximize profits for shareholders. The industries with the lowest profit margins are those with the most competitive pressure, low barriers to entry, and
highest customer satisfaction for the strongest competition. The value added in this case is not captured by the owners of capital directly but by their customers. The industries with the highest margins are de facto the least competitive, more vulnerable to disruption and have
I've become ever more convinced that the primary reason the US perennially underestimates Chinese capabilities is because quixotically, the smartest whites gather in DC. More than any other city, DC is home to by far the most educated, credentialed, and talented white Americans.
on the other hand the Chinese that make it in DC are at best average (for Chinese) because the smarter and more ambitious ones know they have absolutely zero future there and avoid it, leaving little more than striving teachers pet suck ups. This combination of white excellence
and Chinese mediocrity exists in the singular city of Washington DC and nowhere else in America. It is only natural that the immediacy bias of DC wordcels would see the Chinese as being easily brought to heel via their professional wordcelling with which they are without equal.
Liberalism is fundamentally an ideology of great privilege similar to noblesse oblige. It can really only exist under conditions of gross material and social disparity. Unlike the aristocrats superiority which was baked into their bones, the bourgeoisie's Liberal sensibilities
are ephemeral and brittle because their socio-economic position is much more precarious. They can be easily cancelled by social censure far more readily than someone with land rents and armed retainers. It is why whenever Liberal societies undergo even the slightest stress or
or even worse go into decline, Liberal ideas are jettisoned almost immediately for fascist ones in order to restore the status imbalance that is required to sustain pretensions of Liberal superiority. It is why you are seeing so many shit libs going more and more mask off. To
One thing that I've noticed is that despite the number of people claiming programming degrees in India being prodigious, there are almost zero Indian video game developers or really an industry to speak of despite absolutely zero barriers to entry. The most prominent example of
video game development being outsourced to India was the textbook disaster that was the cancelled Prince of Persia title. You would think that with such a huge young market there would be more local entrepreneurs trying to earn money from it. It isn't even a situation of relative
privation as video games are possibly the cheapest form of entertainment on a price/hr ratio. In China, during the late 90s, when much poorer than India today and much lower rates of internet penetration managed to create an ecosystem of video games despite the rampant piracy.
The real black pill of Western government dysfunction isn't that everything is happening by mistake or malevolence, but rather the present state was the historic inevitability of Liberalism combined with people actually trying to immanentize their ideology. The communists attempt
to make their revolutionary vision was very real and very enthusiastic. The more enthusiastic, the more disastrous. Ultimately Liberalism stems from the same branch and moves slower, making changes only so fast as bourgeois society is willing to tolerate but they were heading in
the same direction even if the paths diverged. It's errors only now becoming more evident. The current generation of Western leader's problems is not with their cynicism or duplicity, but rather their sincerity. All elites have tended to place their own interests paramount over