I continue to believe that a lot of our problems today are rooted in our species’ inability to grapple with scale. Some of us (not me!) are good with STEM, but most of us (myself included!) can’t handle the bigger world that technology makes possible.
Until very recently in human history, all we cared about were the people immediately around us. Relatives and neighbors. Not big abstractions like a ‘nation’, much less a ‘race’ or ‘the world’. None of those three words are found in what linguists call basic vocabulary - a set of primal concepts every human being can express.
With exceptions like aristocrats, traders, and travellers, the ancients at best only had a vague sense of people and places other than one’s own. There was no video or audio - no photographs or records. Maybe there were imaginative images - and often just names.
How did a medieval European peasant envision Jesus and his era and environs?
My ancestors could not imagine Hotoke-sama - a name Buddha would never have recognized1 - as an Indian, a physical type they had never seen. They didn’t even know what their own emperor looked like or even what his name was. The Japanese imperial cult was largely a modern creation made possible by public schooling child imprisonment.
Native Hawaiians on the eve of contact with the West had long ago lost contact with any other Polynesians. They might as well have been the only people in existence. They were surrounded by a vast, empty ocean.
I’m surrounded by that very same ocean right now. And yet thanks to technology, you are able to read my words, even though odds are that you are not on my island. Maybe not even in the Pacific. You may be thousands of miles or kilometers away from me.
The word thousand is an abstraction. I can envision ten in my head. But a hundred is too much. Ten rows of ten objects? Too many. A thousand? Forget it.
Yes, I can do the math. 10 x 10 = 100. 100 x 10 = 1000. I’ve memorized relationships of symbols. But I don’t feel what numbers are past a certain point. Notice how religions rely on lower numbers - one that believers can feel. The Trinity strikes a chord that, say, the 256 does not, and not just because of Christian programming. There are many non-Christian threes:
the Ahuric triad of Zoroastrianism: Ahura Mazda, Mithra, and Apam Napat
the Trimūrti of Hinduism (Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva) and its feminine counterpart, the Tridevī (Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Parvati)
the Trikāya ‘three bodies’ of a Buddha and the Three Treasures of Buddhism
the 三清 Three Pure Ones of Taoism: 元始天尊 Yuanshi Tianzun, 靈寶天尊 Lingbao Tianzun, and 道德天尊 Daode Tianzun
the 三貴子 Three Precious Children of Shinto: 天照 Amaterasu the sun goddess, 月讀 Tsukuyomi the moon god, and 素戔嗚 Susanoo the storm god
See Wikipedia’s articles on triple deities and religious triads for more examples.
I’m not arguing that the number three is somehow mystical - merely that it and other recurring lower numbers (the four elements of Greece, the 五行 Five Phases of East Asia, etc.) reflect human cognitive biases. Simplicity may be a red flag - a sign we’re dealing with something man-made. Why would the cosmically significant be conveniently comprehensible for us? Pi isn’t three or a power of a ten - a number we probably care about because we have ten fingers.
I can make an intellectual argument for pi or, say, 256 - it’s two to the eighth power - but what may impress the head may not sway the heart. The concrete has more resonance. That is not to deny the human capacity to deal with the abstract - with Allah, who
is not a formed body, nor a substance circumscribed with limits or determined by measure
i.e., not something that can be visually depicted. And yet Wikipedia tells me that
In premodern times, corporealist views [of Allah] were said to have been more socially prominent among the common people, with more abstract and transcendental views more common for the elite.
What makes an elite elite? A greater ability to deal with abstraction?
Even among the Moslem elite of the past,
both Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) and his student Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 751/1350) argued that the anthropomorphic references to God, such as God's hands or face, are to be understood literally and affirmatively according to their apparent meanings.
In the Koran (38:75), Allah says he created Adam بِيَدَيَّ biyadayya ‘with my hands’. It is hard to speak of an infinite being without resorting to finite metaphors - which are probably reinterpretations - intellectualizations - of originally concrete statements. Were Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim undoing those reinterpretations? I am too ignorant of Islam to confidently answer in the affirmative.
I am ignorant, period. I don’t claim to understand Hawaii. No one truly can, though some come closer than others. Hawaii is a random people zone with over 130 languages. 130-plus different worlds existing side by side with no understanding of each other in most cases. I often don’t know what my neighbors are saying. I often don’t even know what language they’re speaking in.
I often wonder about the Ilocano world. It’s big and yet invisible. Ilocano is the fourth largest language in Hawaii after English, Pidgin, and Tagalog. I don’t know a word of Ilocano. Yes, I could try to learn it - emphasis on “try” - but … I have foreign language fatigue.
And let’s face it, even if I got serious about Ilocano, I’d never be good enough at it to have a meaningful conversation in it. Not at my age. I’m too slow. Too tired.
And Ilocano is too hard. Like Philippine languages in general. I worked on one three decades ago. (See, I’m old.) The experience fried my much younger brain. Subtract the recognizable loanwords from Spanish and English - the colonial layers - and what remains is alien. So alien that I’m always impressed by Filipinos who master English.2 The vast gap between even Japanese and English isn’t as wide as that between a Philippine language and English. The logic of Philippine languages is so different from the Eurasian norm.
Forget the languages. I don’t grok the Filipino experience. The residue of Hispano-American colonialism. The Catholicism.
Yes, I can read books and articles about Filipinos, but is that valid xenosampling? I define xenosampling as an outsider trying to learn about an alien society on the basis of a limited sample.
We all xenosample. You’re probably doing it right now. I might be the only person from Hawaii whose writing you’ve ever read. Am I representative? Absolutely not. Not even of the Japanese from Hawaii. The majority of them love The One Party. They made the highly diverse 2018 Hawaii State Senate possible.
Even if everything I write about Hawaii were accurate, it’s still far from a full picture of the place, and not just because the Ilocano world is foreign to me. I know nothing about a hundred other groups such as the Samoan Mormons. If I did, I’d have a better handle on former Honolulu mayor Mufi Hannemann, an LDS High Council member and arguably the father of our train to nowhere.
Hawaii's Train to Nowhere
I used to think a train in Hawaii was a good idea. I rode the train a lot when I lived in Japan, and a train would have been a time-saving alternative to being stuck in traffic.
How did Mufi3 get non-Samoans to vote for him? Did he get the Mormon vote? I’m sure Hawaii’s political pundits have answers to those questions. But are they the right answers? Are those answers based on inside knowledge of Mufi’s ethnic and religious communities?
My guesses are no and no. Political pundity in Hawaii is merely prettywords with a dash of mild criticism toward The One Party. The One Letter that must rule forever.
Guess Mufi’s party.4 Guess the party of our pundit class. There can only be one party (that matters).
Our media and our intelligentsia isn’t just deeply D. It’s largely imported - and heavily skewed toward Goodwhites who see everything through a PC lens. Noble Native Hawaiians and all that. Which doesn’t include the Ilocano world or anything else that doesn’t excite Caitlin from Seattle.
To be fair, there are Whites and Jews who feel Fili-fascination. I’ve known such Whites, and I recently read a book by a Jew into the Philippines. But those Haoles are rare and not represented on the production side of the propaganda class.
It has taken me a lifetime to realize how bizarre it is that nobody in that class cares about what is arguably Hawaii’s largest ethnic group5 - Filipinos. White Goodthinker writers here live in a drama of Eurosaviors, MAGA monsters, oppressed Nnnnatives, and … a bunch of brown background extras like me. They’re not interested in xenosampling - in unravelling the complexity of Hawaii’s demographic tapestry. They want simple morality tales about colonialism and the climate, and they crank them out for themselves while the Ilocano world just keeps rolling on right beside them unnoticed. And that world is just one out of a hundred among their neighbors. Nobody but Kosraeans6 (not Koreans!7) know what Kosraeans here are thinking.
The Hawaii media have massive selection bias - and make massive sampling errors.
If Americans can’t figure out what the real deal is on tiny islands that are ‘theirs’8, what hope do they have of understanding the rest of the world? Even parts of the world that share their language?
Some of what I’ve seen of Canada, the UK, and Australia through what I call the Amerifilter has turned out to be bogus; e.g.,
The great Canadian ‘hero’ Artur Pawlowski (but at least I saw through The Jordan on day one)
His video boasting about being in the p********* industry has been out for over 2 years. But the same way there has been no follow up from authorities about murders in hospital, there’s been no investigation into Arthur Pawloski or his “Clients”.
British 'hero’ Andrew Bridgen:
Andrew Bridgen MP voted FOR lockdowns.
He voted FOR mandatory vaccinations for care workers.
How many millions of lives have been harmed, perhaps irreparably, because of what he personally did?
(He also publicly promoted the vaccination on his Twitter, where he got the vaccination at "Mason's" pharmacy, and makes sure to mention the number "33" early on in his interview with Malik, but that's just a coincidence, I'm sure...)
The point is that someone who is personally responsible for inflicting so much evil - whilst thousands of us were on the ground from day one fighting back, opposing mandates, attending protests, etc - is no hero, regardless of whether he claims to have had an eleventh-hour change of heart, and he deserves rigorous grilling and cross-examination, not pats on the back.
Australian ‘hero’ Pauline Hanson
I only learned the truth about such ‘heroes’ by bypassing the Amerifilter and reading the Stacks of Canadian
, Briton , and Australian .If understanding the Anglosphere is hard, understanding the rest of the world is even harder. The temptation to swallow the simple narratives that pass through the Anglofilter is strong.
Beware the Anglofilter
I often write the subtitles of my posts before I write the post themselves. And I only have a limited amount of time at the end of my day to write. So sometimes in my rush to pump something out, I never get around to making the point in my subtitle. Such was the case with
So many of those narratives are sold as what’s ‘really’ happening over there. But those who sell them rarely tell you how they xenosample. How do they, as outsiders, get inside?
I used to read an American political blog. I stopped because the author kept detouring into German political ‘inside’ baseball, which was not only boring but baffling. How did someone so deeply embedded in the Elephant Party - someone who made no mention of German language study or residence in Germany - know so much about German politics? Lots of Wikipedia? Google Translate? Deutsche Welle’s English-language content? Without an answer to that question, I had no reason to believe them.
I also used to read a pro-China site. The author was physically in China, but having been to many countries and having met many expats, I know how easy it is to live in an Anglophone bubble abroad.
Or in Hawaii, a Japanese bubble. It is easy for someone from Japan to move here, never learn English, never leave one’s comfort zone, and never sample the rest of the islands except in the most superficial, language-free way: e.g., our nice weather and beaches. But not, say, the Ilocano world. The what world?
I know a USSA veteran who lived in a military bubble here for years. They went to the same movie theater I did. But in a sense they were watching a different movie, one that was very Murrican. They told me things here were pretty much the same as on the Mainland. And that was true … for them. Because their xenosample was limited to their installation and going out from its gates to see a movie or whatever. I don’t think they ever knew any locals. (I only met them online years after they left Hawaii - and the service.)
I’m not saying they should have made the effort to know locals. They were just trying to live their life, not pose as a Hawaii expert.
I know another USSA military person who did strive to make a life here beyond their base. That didn’t … go well.
I’ll just say Whites are often not liked … and I know, because I myself used to be anti-White. My neoCON years changed that:
Should I Have Followed My Initial Instincts on 9/11?
I still can’t get myself worked up about Charlie Kirk.
Networking with White conservatarians made me see a world I never imagined - one that bore no resemblance to my paranoid fantasies about Bible-thumping neo-Nazi Klansmen. I had no idea that Christian Republicans could be so … nice. Even naive.
As I explain below, my warblogging was a xenosampling disaster when it came to Afghanistan and Iraq … but it was a success at xenosampling the American Right. A huge fraction of the population.
The Sinophile author I used to read had no interest in xenosampling their adopted home. They showed no awareness of any China beyond what they could learn in their big-city luxury condo from their English-speaking friends handlers. I doubt they saw the China I saw. The dilapidated, filthy factory where a teenage girl was assembling electronics by hand.9 The China their handlers wouldn’t let them see. A vast land hidden behind a language curtain.
What can hide behind such a curtain? I was once asked what the Japanese side of a bilingual Japanese/English introducing-Japan-to-foreigners book was saying. The Japanese text did not match the English; it was promoting 角田忠信 Tsunoda Tadanobu’s belief in the ‘Japanese brain’:
According to Tsunoda's theory, the Japanese people use their brains in a unique way, different from "western" brains. The Japanese brain, argues Tsunoda, hears or processes music using the left hemisphere, where western brains use the opposite or right hemisphere to process music.
Apparently whoever translated the Japanese text into English for that book thought Tsunoda’s ideas were too far out for foreigners - though they were flattering for a domestic audience that bought into 日本人論 Nihonjinron - the ‘discourse on Japaneseness’. Unfortunately, if Karel van Wolferen can be believed, Tsunoda’s
views have been officially credited to the extent of being introduced abroad by the semi-governmental Japan Foundation
I have my doubts about Van Wolferen because he
cannot read or write Japanese, and is not even fluent in spoken Japanese after living in Japan for decades. […] Bungeishunjū, a Japanese monthly magazine, stated that it is indeed incredible that a book written by a high school graduate who cannot read or write Japanese is taken as a serious commentary about Japan.
I’ve also seen Sinophobes lacking credentials - and by that I don’t mean magic letters after their name from a uni-farce-ity. It doesn’t bother me if they - like Van Wolferen - didn’t go to college. It does bother me if they’re as illiterate as Van Wolferen - if they can’t read 毛主席语录 or the latest 人民日报 - and reading in translation doesn’t count! Being able to get around with broken Mandarin doesn’t count either. I don’t trust people who can’t go behind the language curtain. Why should I believe such people when they bemoan Xi’s dark dystopia? Would you believe someone who didn’t speak English claiming that Trump’s AmeriKKKa was the Fourth Reich? Can they show me Trump’s My Struggle - a book they couldn’t read even if it did exist?
Always ask such questions when reading someone reporting on a place you don’t know. How do they know about that place?
As a neoCON, I made the big mistake of trusting the Amerifilter/Anglofilter. Of believing in bloggers who wrote natively in my language, who won me over with style despite an absence of substance - of any understanding of the languages and cultures of Afghanistan and Iraq. None of that was necessary to sell me on their mythology of capital-S Soldiers10 and jihadis.
Look for people who sound plausible. Who aren’t selling heroes or villains - at least not of the Hitler™ variety - savior of the White race to some and a genocidal dictator to others.
Make no mistake: I have a very low opinion of the characters and countries lauded by the Dissident Right and loathed by the mainstream media. But it is not a cartoony opinion11, and it is as well-informed as possible given limitations on my time and interest, based on what locals and bilingual/bicultural transplants have to say, not expats in bubbles or Murrican ignorami.
I want to close on a positive note with a specific example of the kind of source I value - a concrete recommendation - a shout out to
who reads Szabolcs Dull’s Hungarian-language Substack - and who made me see the Hungary no one else is talking about in English:A false impression is created of Hungary as a national-conservative paradise, foreigners move to Budapest and invest everything in this so-called traditional utopia, and end up with a bitter taste in their mouths. I know plenty of right-wing Hungarians who have no sympathy for the masses of misguided foreigners who visit the country and leave disappointed. However, I do have sympathy for these nomadic patriots, because ultimately they’re just making the best decision they can based on the information they’ve been given. Unfortunately, that information just isn’t very good. I’m trying to change that by offering an insider’s perspective into Central European politics and business.
Don’t fall for the hype about Orbán and Fidesz in either direction:
Within Hungary, Orbán’s government is tolerated simply because the average Hungarian is too focused on day-to-day tasks to give much thought as to who actually runs the country.
Hungary sounds like every country.
Ideologically, the biggest difference between Orbán’s center-right Fidesz party and the opposition alliance of liberals and socialists, is regarding internal economic interests. There is very little real difference in policy so far as social issues are concerned. Both sides support on-demand access to state-funded abortion. Both sides support the UN’s SDGs, and both sides supported mandatory vaccines and mask wearing during Covid.
Fidesz as a party has taken every opportunity it has found to sell Hungary to the highest bidder, from selling Budapest’s best real estate to Turkish and Israeli investors, to selling Hungarian girls to porn kings like György Gattyán and his network of degenerates.
Despite this, well-meaning and otherwise well-informed commentators in the United States and other Anglosphere countries are under the illusion that Hungary is some sort of nationalist utopia. This illusion is maintained by hyperbolic and sensationalist headlines put out by mainstream media organizations accusing Orbán of being a “right-wing nationalist” and an “autocrat”, all of which gives the impression that Orbán must be some sort of benevolent dictator unfairly slandered by the global liberal-left establishment. Unfortunately, it’s a bit more nuanced than that.
Nuance is key. The more complexity you capture, the closer you are to reality. I don’t claim to understand anywhere, and I’m operating blind outside of Hawaii, but if you’re nuanced about wherever you are, you’ll come off as more credible to me.
Not that I matter. Write what you want. Believe what you want.
All I’m asking here - and you don’t have to do anything I ask - is to consider the sources of your beliefs. Not whether they belong to your tribe. Or whether they have the ‘right’ e-duh-cation. The truth lies not in child prisons or indocrination camps for adults. It often lies behind language curtains. Can your sources pull back the curtains?
Can they xenosample?
If he was (were?) real. I have doubts about the historicity of the Buddha.
The Japanese name Hotoke (-sama is an honorific suffix) is a Japanization of a name for the Buddha in some earlier Korean peninsular language - almost certainly Paekche:
The Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan) provides a date of 552 for when King Seong of Baekje [= Paekche] (now western South Korea) sent a mission to Emperor Kinmei that included an image of the Buddha Shakyamuni, ritual banners, and sutras. This event is usually considered the official introduction of Buddhism to Japan. Other sources, however, give the date of 538 and both dates are thought to be unreliable. However, it can still be said that in the middle of the sixth century, Buddhism was introduced through official diplomatic channels [from the Korean peninsula].
I’m not counting Filipinos who grew up in the Anglosphere. There is nothing remarkable about people mastering the language spoken around them.
Mufi seems to be referred to by his first name under most circumstances. I’ve never heard anyone call him “Hannemann” in speech.
His surname reflects his German ancestry (his father seems to have been half-German) - and fourteen years of German rule over Samoa.
I am hesitate to speak of Filipinos as a single ethnic group because the Philippines is even more diverse than Europe with maybe as many as two hundred languages.
When a Filipino and I worked on a Philippine language that wasn’t theirs, my buddy had almost no advantage (apart from their superior intelligence and language abilities). Yes, their native language and the language we were trying to figure out were related - but not very closely.
Some linguists go so far as to declare that the languages of the Philippines do not belong to a single Philippine branch of the same Austronesian ‘south island’ family. In their minority view as I understand it, ‘Philippine languages’ is a geographical rather than a ‘genetic’ term referring to languages located in the Philippines that belong to multiple branches of Austronesian. Those linguists regard common, uniquely Philippine characteristics as local innovations that spread across the region rather than descent from a single Proto-Philippine ancestor.
Philippine languages may then be comparable to the Indo-European languages of Europe which are not descended from a single Proto-European ancestor. Celtic, Romance, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, and Greek are all related at a very deep Indo-European level with Armenian, Iranic (e.g., Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, and Ossetian) and Indic (Sanskrit and its descendants like Hindi) but do not form a ‘European’ subfamily.
I am not familiar enough with Philippine languages to judge the validity of the no-Philippine-family hypothesis. It’s okay to be agnostic - especially when either possibility fits the point I really want to make about diversity. Even if all the Philippine languages really do go back to a single Proto-Philippine ancestor, no one has argued that Ilocano and Tagalog are closely related. Robert Blust, an advocate of Proto-Philippines, places those two languages into two out of fifteen different branches of his Philippine language group in his 2013 book on Austronesian.
Kosraeans are so obscure that the English Wikipedia still has no article about them.
But Kosraeans, like Koreans, were also once ruled by the Japanese.
Whether Hawaii is or should be part of ‘America’ is debatable. Hence the scare quotes.
Granted, this was many years ago. The girl is presumably now a woman with a much better standard of living.
NeoCON bloggers capitalized soldier in accordance with this Godforce directive:
Soon after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, General Peter J. Schoomaker, the US Army chief of staff, gave an unusual order: he promoted the letter “s.” “It’s Soldier, not soldier,” reported the American military paper Stars and Stripes. From then on, all “command information products” would capitalize the word “soldier.” According to Schoomaker’s office, the change would give “Soldiers the respect and importance they’ve always deserved, especially now in their fight against global terrorism.”
[…]
“Oh, man,” a contrarian groused (in now-deleted comments). “Military leaders are now in the business of setting trends in proper English? That notion is as laughable as it is absurd.” But no other commenter was amused. “Fortunately for you there are Those in the Military—Marines, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Enlisted Men and Women, Guardsmen and All Who are defending your privilege to be an idiot,” replied one.
I ‘like’ how the reply goes so far as to capitalize “Those”, “Military”, “Men”, “Women”, “All”, and “Who” - which went beyond the norms of neoCON blogging style.
Okay, I do mock Trump as the Great Orange God. I may use cartoony language. But I don’t view him as the epitome of evil. He is vile, but he is just a puppet - a tool of devils rather than the Devil himself.
Again, nice text...I didn't forget the promise of a few words, but I have some family business (which I forgot, as usual), so as soon as I'm done with them, I'll write to you.
Thanks for this text too, I really like it.
I sent a song to Rurik today, so I'm sending it to you too. The weather here is really nice today, and you're in Hawaii, so I think this rhythm suits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yBnIUX0QAE