It kind of reminded me of when horror movies borrow Catholic aesthetics (bc seen as spooky, medieval, etc) without really being interested in the logics, anxieties, and practices of Catholicism. Think the Exorcist book (very Catholic) vs the Supernatural tv show (very not Catholic)

Entire time my wife and I were watching, we just kept pointing things out and saying, “this had to be written by Protestants, right?”

Jesus Christ the Glaurung one

Genuinely feel a lot of popular complaints about political, cultural, and economic systems come down to “why can’t they just be run community-style?”

This doesn’t mean those criticisms are wrong, but that’s modernity!!

Prof D! Don’t tell people this! Rake in the money!! Prof D!!

This is kind of how big projects work in the PRC.

The fractal nature of the government means generally you have to get a ton of stakeholders to buy in to any given project (almost always not for the original reasons of the project), but then the snowball becomes impossible to stop

the China studies version of this is a story about the leadership that you hear from somebody in DC who vouches for it because they got it from a source in China who read about it on a Taiwanese tabloid who copied the story from the Epoch Times who made it up in New York state.

There was an article when that came out claiming that those lyrics in particular were purposefully dull as a protest for the song being required to be in English for some industry ranking structure

I have no idea if this is true

The only Korea philosopher I know of is Byung-Chul Han and I don’t think he is aware K-Pop exists

Genuinely funny how much Vidal hates Laozi in that book lol

Like the main point I think he’s making (the “concubine” system was coercing young girls into unfree sexual labor and it is fair to call that slavery) is definitely true

He focuses on kinship group systems of production instead

Though I can see that mixing well with OP’s point about how we should keep in mind how unfree/coerced gender relations are in those groups

It does still seem very different from either Rome or Joseon in terms of calling it a slave society

I’ll be honest, I liked that book but I don’t think it’s exactly reliable historically

My reference for Zhou is usually Van Glahn‘s Econmimic History of China, and he argues the Marxian slave state characterization isn’t useful in the Zhou context

I’m not a Zhou historian, but my understanding was that it was a society with slavery but not a slave society, the distinction being that slavery was not central to economic production in the way it was in Rome or Greece?

For a comparison I know better, Ming had slaves vs Joseon was a slave society

I feel like you test this by looking at polities with “produce a few geniuses” vs “produce a lot of straightforward workmanlike generals”, then cross reference it with those culture’s affinity for beards

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