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T. Greer Profile picture
T. Greer
@Scholars_Stage
• Director @CSTranslate • Essayist https://t.co/QAwli8kcMU • Long takes on 🇨🇳 politics, 🇺🇸 conservatism, ancient history • Old tweets on auto-delete!
20 subscribers
Dec 2 • 20 tweets • 6 min read
Overly large books that I thought were really worth it:

1. Dream of the Red Chamber
2. Paradise Lost
3. Iliad
4. War and Peace
5. Life and Fate
6. House of Government
7. War in Human Civilization
8. Muqaddihmah
9. Democracy in America
10. Mote's Imperial China
11. Sima Qian's Record of the Grand Historian
12. Caro's Lyndon B Johnson books Numbers not meant as a ranking
Oct 28 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
My most center-lib opinion is that the western China journalists are good, actually.

Most have gone across the country chasing stories, are well plugged into interesting circles in Beijing and Shanghai, and great many have experienced some rough things at the hand of the state. Like yeah, I have respect for the girl who got roughed up by police in Inner Mongolia or the guy who has to flush his interview notes down the toilet before “tea.”
Oct 20 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
I think this thread takes the wrong lesson from Bill Kristol's trajectory. (And the point I am going to make is true for many people who have moved the opposite way, like Elon Musk). Eric Gould and Esteban Klor have this paper where they analyze American voters who believe that abortion is the single most important issue in American politics over time. Remember: before the 1980s abortion was not polarized by party. Image
Oct 19 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Do not use the word “status.”

It is a poor substitution for “Honor” and “esteem.” The modern understanding of the "status" crystalized in the writings of American sociologists between 1920 and 1950.

How did people talk about "status" before then? Do we seriously propose that thing this word describes did not exist then--or that the people then living were too stupid to have noticed it?

Oct 17 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
This is a very interesting essay. It reminds me a bit of an old D. Brooks essay on the status anxieties of the nationally famous op-ed writer.

Such a writer might make $250k (in early aughts money), have a nationally syndicated column, and complete job security. Puts him leagues above his fellow reporters and columnists. But as a leader of his industry he meets leaders in other industries; he interacts regularly with people whose wealth grows more in a day than his does in a year. He thus starts to think of himself differently.

Aaron is very successful at what he does—successful enough to realize that he is as smart and hard working as many of the rich, powerful, and influential that he meets. He has a different reference class for high ambition.

A lot of people who have never impressed a billionaire or a high politician are crapping on his post. I don’t really think they have the right to—it is very easy to reject the temptations of a world you have never touched. Now here is the part @aaron_renn does not say, but is important to his broader lessons-learned: there are tens of thousands of “tech workers” in Silicon Valley but only a handful of Zuckerbergs; many kids at McKinsey but only a few rise as high as Buttigieg (and is that really high?).

Attempting to climb the honor hierarchies with the highest gradients is not the same thing as actually reaching their summit.
Oct 12 • 26 tweets • 4 min read
I appreciate Dario’s willingness to explicitly lay out what he foresees AGI to look like.

However, there are projections in this essay that I think are conceptually flawed—or at least very underdeveloped. 1. Dario spends a large portion of his essay talking about the need for a liberal-democratic political coalition to control the commanding heights of AI technology to keep this technology from authoritarian powers.
Oct 4 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
In a "mature precision strike regime" where long range missiles and drones are accurate and plentiful, the naval battle field will be divided into three broad areas:

1. The region where the land-based long-range fires of the enemy will destroy all that enters.

2. the friendly region under the cover of your own missile-aircraft-drone complex.

3. A no-man's land where neither side has the protection of land based fires.

In this sort of weapons regime, the key assets, especially in early stages of any war, will be those that can safely penetrate the enemy bubble without taking fire.

By and large that means long-range stealth aircraft and submersibles.Image The PLA Rocket force currently fields: Image
Oct 2 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
I am trying to understand if attitudes like this are downstream of video games, role playing games, or Bryan Sanderson That is part of it but I don’t think it is the whole thing. (See next tweet)

Sep 24 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I think this poster is correct, but not for the correct reasons.

Marx’s empirical predictions were out of date by time Lenin wrote IMPERIALISM—indeed, it is *why* Lenin had to write that book. Marx took the economists of his time very seriously. Very hard to imagine him not taking subsequent economic research just as seriously.

Or the sort of historical developments that caused Lenin to ”update” Marx’s ideas—and the century of developments that followed after that.
Sep 17 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
Less people should write books than do, I think.

As I see it there are five reasons to write a book, instead of something else. 1. as a grant of authority to get people to pay attention to that something else—writing the book gets you on the television, on the lecture circuit, etc.
Sep 12 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
Some of the themes of Vassily Grossman’s LIFE AND FATE are subtle. Some are counterintuitive. But one reoccurring theme is the value—the superiority, even—of kindness. Image Explicitly and repeatedly he extols kindness as the better virtue. Better to be kind, he says, than to be good. Be kind.
Aug 27 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
I think I have three principle critiques of our conception of the “western canon.”

1. It erases the Germanic contribution to the tradition.
2. It overemphasizes philosophy over history, poetry, etc.
3. It cuts off around 1920–and in particular, doesn’t treat social science developments c. 1920-1960 seriously.

A few short thoughts. These are not critiques of the *concept* of the Western canon—for the sake of this discussion I am assuming that it is fine to stick with the western, and fine to have a canon.
Jul 29 • 39 tweets • 6 min read
Listening to Caro’s LBJ series on auto book right now. LBJ just finished college.

Some preliminary notes on a series variously described as greatest biography ever written, greatest narrative nonfiction ever written, etc. 1. Thus far the “greatest” title is deserved.

There is a very curious way in which this “greatest” title has not brought Cato the prestige he deserves.

That sounds very silly but hear me out.
Jul 21 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I think this is one of the clearest examples of the fraud like nature of Arnaud’s project.

As if every Chinese person who lives in a higher tier city doesn’t have a dozen stories about 土豪 they’ve seen (much less the ones that go viral). As for the *specific* problem of extravagant weddings—it was so common a phenomenon the government literally moved to ban it

amp.abc.net.au/article/105883…
Jul 21 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
There is a much simpler explanation for this behavior.

For a very long time Cantonese was the most commonly spoken dialect in western “China towns.” Many, if not most, of these people did not speak Mandarin well or at all.

So for upwards 70 years if a random citizen of western nation met someone who spoke Chinese… there was about a 50/50 chance it was either Cantonese or Mandarin. With the exception of a few Hokkien speakers you were exceedingly unlikely to find any other dialects represented. (To this you then add the British colonial presence and HK’s outsized influence as prime conduit to the Chinese world for those same decades. There were schools where you could take Cantonese classes—never seen a western university offer the same for Sichuanese or whatever).
Jul 5 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
There are some serious oversights in this thread’s arguments IMHO.

But the essential idea of “the US seems to be both surging ahead and experiencing relative global decline because its economic and political power is growing within the western bloc, even as that bloc as a whole declines” is very interesting. It is somewhat difficult to identify countries in the Western ambit whose economic reach, industrial capacity, or hard military power look much better in 2025 than they did in 2005.

U.K.? France? Germany? Maybe Japan?

America is the grand exception.
Jun 12 • 20 tweets • 6 min read
This is a very fun paper where economists integrate loads of archeological data from ancient Mesopotamia to test theories of why governments exist pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10…
Image The basic data set is a set of surveys completed by archeologists in the mid 20th century where they did a universal sweep of the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys. Image
May 31 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
Good thread.

My reservation with the Pottinger/Gallagher argument is something I have expressed privately to many but not publicly.

In condensed tweet form it looks something like this: At issue in these debates are interpretations of Chinese intent, Chinese capabilities, and likely Chinese reactions and counter strategies to our own decisions.

Less discussed are American capabilities and likely American reactions to this thing spiraling upwards.
May 14 • 37 tweets • 5 min read
Earlier this year my wife decided to watch Law and Order: SVU from the beginning. It began in 1999.

The show tries to stay topical with the news. Some observations. 1. In the early episodes the cops are portrayed as very hard-bitten. Every episode they threaten shop owners with the IRS, rough people up, and generally talk in a way the writers obviously associated with working class New Yorkers.

By 2006 or so this is mostly done with.
May 9 • 36 tweets • 12 min read
The Chinese economy has gone wobbly. The CPC has a plan to save it. They will save it through science.

In my latest essay I aim to explain this plan... and the ideas behind it.

🧵 Image The blog post pictured above is an expansion on a piece I wrote with @nancyyu616, published in Foreign Policy about a week ago.

May 2 • 35 tweets • 5 min read
You do not understand the WASP aristocracy if you do not understand that it was originally constructed not on the exclusion of Catholics or Jews or any of that. The most important demographic that the WASPs defined themselves against… was the southerners. The WASPS were born with the Civil War. They were created by the marriage—often literal marriage—of two groups of people: newly wealthy industrialists (and their financiers) and older grandees and politicos from the Northeastern seaboard.