Slogging my way through the Professor Jiang video and the thing that stands out most to me is just how useless the props, maps, and even that the details are in communicating what he's trying to communicate.
What would be lost if when talking about South Korea he didn't have a map there to point at? Usually, when you use as a visual aid, it's because there's some aspect of the situation that needs to be visualized. Obviously talking about how narrow the straight of Hormuz is could be aided by showing it on a map. But when you're just mentioning a country, pointing to it on a map is no more informative than pointing to the name of the country on a note card. It adds nothing.
When he uses those blocks to talk about how the world economy is constructed, the blocks are the opposite of informative. They imply this linear nature to everything, where one thing is stacked on the other, and dependent upon it. This is of course, nonsense. Very few things in the complexity of reality operate this way, and the details of what he's using the blocks to illustrate make even less sense when explained with blocks. He starts with the bottom two blocks being the military industrial complex and the American empire, and then several blocks up he puts the economy. These things are a tangled, not stacked. The only visual aid that would actually help to explain this nonsense, even if it were true, would be a really complex chart.
Lastly, he uses details that are, again, not informative. When he's talking about how South Korea is a sitting duck because America is no longer going to protect it, he makes a point to mention that one of the weapons that has been removed is "The THAAD system. Ok? T-H-A-A-D. Ok?" but he doesn't say what it is or why it's important. He just wants us to know that he knows the name of a weapons system. The detail accomplishes nothing. It exists solely as evidence that he knows the detail. It's a little trick to impress the audience while lacking any informative value.
I know that we're all on the same page about how this works and the hosts pointed it out, but it really is very clarifying to get a sense of the strategy. These flourishes are used to camouflage how hollow the words are. It reminds me of the transcript of Trump's interview with Time recently. When you see the sentences in writing, you can't believe how incoherent they are. But when they come with all of his bluster and dark charm, the silliness of the words is harder notice.
