Scholar's Stage

Excellent blog post on this question: https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/

Because these are not mostly disputes over money or material goods. They’re over honour. If the broader society showed some sign of caring about honour the way petty thugs who do drive by shootings to receding slights do they’d shift to the societally airbed way quickly. In the bourgeois society we have where dignity not honour is how worth is ascribed there’s no script for them to follow. Insofar as society is becoming victimhood based on how it conceived worth that’s equally unappealing. https://scholars-stage.org/honor-dignity-and-victimhood-a-tour-through…

Where have you been the last 20 plus years? This is a subject that's been wrestled with in many high profile books and articles over that period and beyond, and how this is not self-evident to anyone who reads is beyond me. Here's one article on it I have on hand, if for some reason a search brings up nothing: https://scholars-stage.org/a-few-more-notes-on-the-dearth-of-great-wor…

This essay, pubished in April, received a lot of responses from other political commentators. The author (Tanner Greer) linked and replied to some of them in this follow-up: https://scholars-stage.org/further-notes-on-the-new-right/

> There's a good chance the accademic has read a bit of marx, maybe even most of marx, but it's just nothing in comparison to the degree of inculcation you get by actually being a marxist surrounded by other marxists. Tanner Greer actually has an entire article on the necessity and difficulty of immersing oneself in the discourse: https://scholars-stage.org/the-education-china-hands-need-but-most-do-… He's also definitely read "Governance of China", the book series droptablemain suggests he should read (he references it occasionally https://scholars-stage.org/?s=Governance%20of%20China ) Suffice to say he knows his stuff.

Excellent text and Winner's "Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community" is a milestone. Further reading: 1) Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. ‘The Californian Ideology’. Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72. 2) Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005. 3) Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006. 4) Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013. 5) Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. The Wellek Library Lectures. Columbia University Press, 2019. 6) Greer, Tanner. ‘The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite’. The Scholar’s Stage, 21 August 2024. https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-paideia-of-… 7) Stevens, Marthe, Steven R. Kraaijeveld, and Tamar Sharon. ‘Sphere Transgressions: Reflecting on the Risks of Big Tech Expansionism’. Information, Communication & Society 27, no. 15 (2024): 2587–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2353782. 8) Lewis, Becca. ‘“Headed for Technofascism”: The Rightwing Roots of Silicon Valley’. Technology. The Guardian (London), 29 January 2025.…

Well said; I agree with you (and Augé). Another place I've seen this discussed is this fantastic blogpost on Scholar's Stage: https://scholars-stage.org/the-problem-isnt-the-merit-its-the-ocracy/ In the post, Tanner Greer excerpts from Andrew Yang's book The War on Normal People — here's the relevant quote in full, but I recommend clicking through and reading the whole post: > In coming years it’s going to be even harder to forge a sense of common identity across different walks of life. A lot of people who now live in the bubble grew up in other parts of the country. They still visit their families for holidays and special occasions. They were brought up middle-class in normal suburbs like I was and retain a deep familiarity with the experiences of different types of people. They loved the mall, too. > In another generation this will become less and less true. There will be an army of slender, highly cultivated products of Mountain View and the Upper East Side and Bethesda heading to elite schools that has been groomed since birth in the most competitive and rarefied environments with very limited exposure to the rest of the country. > When I was growing up, there was something of an inverse relationship between being smart and being good-looking. The smart kids were bookish and awkward and the social kids were attractive and popular. Rarely were the two sets of qualities found together in the same people. The nerd camps I went to looked the part. >…

Unfortunately, I think the probability is pretty significant. Metaculus currently predicts a 1-in-3 chance of invasion by 2035, which sounds about right to me, maybe even a little low. A whole lot of signs/incentives pointing in that direction: - China's grim demographic trends mean that there will never be a better time than now: it only gets harder, with fewer fighting-age men available, the longer they wait. - The "decade of concern" [0] means that the U.S. armed forces will be uniquely unprepared to defend Taiwan in the 2020's and early 2030's because of a generational equipment overhaul, but will be better-positioned after that. - China is very aware that America's huge industrial mobilization for WWII is what pulled it out of the Great Depression. - The years of 10% annual economic growth are gone - not even necessarily because of mismanagement (although there's been plenty of that too), but because growth eventually taps out to developed-country levels. War is excellent for shoring up stagnating support with both the general public and hardliners. [0]: https://scholars-stage.org/welcome-to-the-decade-of-concern/

Worth quoting this passage from an insightful article[1] People fought in Afghanistan, and people died, but not always in the obvious way. They had been fighting for so long, twenty-three years then, that by the time the Americans arrived the Afghans had developed an elaborate set of rules designed to spare as many fighters as they could. So the war could go on forever. Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends, a tournament where you never knew which team you’d be on when the next game got under way. Shirts today, skins tomorrow. On Tuesday, you might be part of a fearsome Taliban regiment, running into a minefield. And on Wednesday you might be manning a checkpoint for some gang of the Northern Alliance. By Thursday you could be back with the Talibs again, holding up your Kalashnikov and promising to wage jihad forever. War was serious in Afghanistan, but not that serious. It was part of everyday life. It was a job. Only the civilians seemed to lose. Battles were often decided this way, not by actual fighting, but by flipping gangs of soldiers. One day, the Taliban might have four thousand soldiers, and the next, only half that, with the warlords of the Northern Alliance suddenly larger by a similar amount. The fighting began when the bargaining stopped, and the bargaining went right up until the end. The losers were the ones who were too stubborn, too…

> History may be written by the victors, but the losers still get to dictate theory. I feel like Tanner Greer's old post "History is written by the losers" is relevant here: https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/

Isn't China currently among the leaders of material science with lots of top 10 universities located in China? [0] (in rankings that do not incorporate prestige but actual scientific output) [0] https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/

reminds me of this article https://scholars-stage.org/uber-is-a-poor-replacement-for-utopia/

India is much more concerned with China these days. > I was struck on this trip by how clearly India’s chosen rival is no longer Pakistan, but China. It does not matter if we are talking in military, technological, economic, or even cultural terms. The default comparison Indians make is with China. https://scholars-stage.org/observations-from-india/

See also this article from 2016, where I first read about Sima Qian: https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/

A much better-written essay on a similar thesis: https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives…

This tends to be true on the scale of nations, but not necessarily at the scale of the individual. People who wrote histories (before the advent of history as we know it today) were frequently people who were forced out of power after some personal failure or through no fault of their own, and then wrote a history defending themselves. https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/

>This is a weirdly specific complaint that imho makes far too much of the 'death ground' thing. True that, but there has been plenty of more substantive critique. e.g. https://scholars-stage.org/not-everyone-likes-sunzi/

This article is from February 2020, so it should be contextualized in the fact that it was written prior to the Ukraine War. Greer's most recent Taiwan essay is here: https://scholars-stage.org/we-can-only-kick-taiwan-down-the-road-so-fa…

Indeed, reminded me of this article from a few years back, which left quite the impression: https://scholars-stage.org/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are/

The point is not mostly about economic axis, but the cultural one. In the economic axis, you could argue that at least a certain part of the Republicans has moved to the left. The emergence of the New Right [1][2] speaks to that. Or Trump's shtick of being against "unfair" free-trade deals. Or that Republicans are now the party of the working class. [1]: https://scholars-stage.org/the-problem-of-the-new-right/ [2]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-pet…

this is the first post i've seen on reconstruction of an already ailing now disaster-struck russian economy. real cultural victory is finding a non-zero sum solution, is moving beyond retribution & zeal over wrongs. this nation was suffering & is about to be suffeing horribly. how we start to the next chapters both feels super premature, but also, is of core character & essence. reconciliation, forgiveness, brotherhood must be possible for this nation (if not it's oligarchs). good post. scholar-stage's Pausing at the Precipice was another good call for de-zealing, beginning to consider our values & long term response. https://scholars-stage.org/pausing-at-the-precipice/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30502860 (3 points, 8 hours ago, 0 comments)

No, no, I'm not talking about psychological baggage, but a very concrete biological mechanism. Take a look at this for a good description: https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives…

Seems like Xi Jinping has decided to put a stop to the entertainers in China: https://scholars-stage.org/xi-jinpings-war-on-spontaneous-order/ Interesting how "the market" has seemingly spontaneously created things like YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagram influencers, etc. Wherever there is money to be made, someone's there. Political news is hot in the attention economy? Macedonians make fake news sites with Google ads: https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/

For a counterpoint to this, look no further than: https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/ The winners of history are often too busy with enjoying the spoils of their victory and building up their newly won empire to have time to produce historical narrative, while the losers often have nothing better left to do in their exile/imprisonment or similar situation.

History is very often written by the losers, provided they're still alive. The "winners" are often too busy doing other things to write the history. https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/ > Had Thucydides defeated Brasidas, he would be known today not as a historian, but as a military strategist, a strategist who never had the time to travel the world and collect the material needed to write his history. Even winning historians need time in defeat to write their histories—had Churchill’s party not been kicked out of power by British voters after the Second World War was over, Churchill’s famous account of that war would never have been written. > When high position is stolen from you, and access to the heights of wealth and power denied, there is little one can do about it—except write. History is thus rarely a “weapon of the weak.” The judgments of the historian do not serve the margins. They do not even serve the masses. They are a weapon in the hand of defeated elites, the voices of men and women who could be in power, but are not. What was true in Thucydides day is true in our own. WWII history was also in many cases literally written by defeated German generals.