You missed the point. I made an analogy, you missed the point about the analogy. -- It seems that you're interpreting the oil analogy as a reference to belief

You missed the point. I made an analogy, you missed the point about the analogy. -- It seems that you're interpreting the oil analogy as a reference to belief, or culture more generally. But I said right there at the top, it's not about the contents, it's about how a western audience could potentially react to the way a selection of commented quotes of an ancient chinese thinker is presented. The cultural facts you mentioned are relevant culturally but irrelevant both to the blogpost and my critique of it. They are related, and share similar words and concepts, and it is even nuanced, but talks about another subject. While your subject is related to cultural identity, mine is about charlatanism. I don't think the blogpost is trying to appropriate chinese culture, in the same way Häagen-Dazs is not trying to undermine the scandinavians. However, in both cases, we have a case of deception. The deception is not against a culture, but against a possible victim that does not know the target culture. I'm not talking about migration, I'm not talking about culture appropriation, I'm not judging nations or cultures by value. I understand this is difficult for most audiences to grasp, and I'm not saying you don't understand it. Think of a cloud of different subjects related to culture. Matters of identity, belief, appropriation, all share a similar group (talk about culture, mainly). My critique is more closely related to another group of ideas (critical thinking, avoiding cult-behavior, manipulation of perception, cold reading). It is true that these both clouds of subjects intersect, but briefly. Some people say religion or certain cultures are manipulative, and they also describes themselves as skeptics. Through that intersection, you could have derived a reply that confuses a lot of audiences, and it would appease to these kinds of religious skeptics (militant atheism), moving the discussion towards a more easy to navigate terrain (it's easy to point out the mistakes of militant atheists, and hard to spot the difference between a secular-type and an atheist-type). Again, not that you don't know (on the contrary, you demonstrate quite an ablity to select subjects). --- Your reply (possibly accidentaly?) hits a combination of notes around the subject that is curious. It doesn't pass scrutiny. For example, if it was part of a larger corpus of text on culture, both of our comments should have been left out (mine for not being about culture, yours for being a continuation of mine. you broke the chain, man). In another example, my comment would be perhaps be in a larger corpus about secular though, but your reply woundn't (from there, you started talking about culture as the main subject. breaking the chain again, man). Makes sense?