“What’s more, if we are going to bash China, Darfur is a better topic than usual to bash them about.”

Oh, I don’t know. Making pet food out of toxic waste or putting antifreeze in toothpaste and cough syrup are all pretty good reasons, too. Or, you know, the time they sold children’s toys made out of a date-rape drug was pretty cool, too.

I’d say when it comes to country-bashing, China offers something for everyone.

China has a 1.13:1 male:femal gender ratio, massive internal migration from rural to urban areas, and a state policy of gradual economic liberalization after decades of central control.

Even if it weren’t for Tibet and Xinjiang (which we never hear about for some reason) the whole country is a ticking time bomb.

All sides agree that the killings are dramatically down, and no one accuses the government of orchestrating them.

“No one that knows what’s good for them, anyway. Heh, heh, heh.”

Scanning through the AM while driving yesterday, I heard a talk radio skeecher say that if liberals think Tibet should be free, then they have to also support the invasion of IRAQ, since, you know, we’re freeing Iraq. From China I guess.

The amount of straw these people use, I swear.

Remember, one of the alleged big benefits from promoting free trade with countries such as China was that it’d somehow, someway make them stop being oppressive assholes. Hasn’t worked out so well so far, has it?

China has one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and it has never- and I mean absolutely, 107% never- had any shred of democracy in its history. Its history is continual hand-off of control from emperor to emperor, hobbled for a century or two here and there by brutal warfare. The last Chinese imperial family weren’t true Chinese at all, but rather, conquerers from northern lands.

Pretend like Rome never fell, but endured up until the beginning of the 20th century, and then Mussolini took over. That’s pretty much China.

So with THAT being said, it was extremely ignorant for people to expect a rich tradition of autocracy to somehow emulate a representative democracy overnight. It may never, honestly…our Constitution and Bill of Rights were born out of centuries’ movement toward more individual rights. China doesn’t have that movement in its history at all.

BUT…and I hate to say this, as it seems like faint praise…it’s certainly a more free society right now than it ever (Ever.) has been, and that’s something. Something small, something miniscule, but something.

Meant to say Imperial Rome.

BoingBoing linked to this June ’07 story from National Geographic Magazine called China’s Instant Cities.

Barely on topic but still interesting.

The assassins who target union organizers, civil society leaders, feminists, rural peasant movement leaders, and human & civil rights defenders are the right wing narco-paramilitary death squads.

Although it is true that those numbers have declined somewhat under President Alvaro Uribe, it is also true that the paramilitaries were launched in their modern form under Governor Alvaro Uribe in his “Convivir” program in Antioquia (you know, Medellin) state.

They went on to kill — according to the government’s own statistics — up to 70% of the civilians killed in the civil war — including their specialty of massacring entire villages with the support of the army.

So how pleased am I supposed to be that the man on whose family ranch the modern paramilitary movement formed and under his governorship exploded into national viability decided that once president he would curb their worse offenses?

The paramilitaries are also re-forming.

In addition, Uribe’s allies in both appointed & elected government keep getting arrested for working with the outlawed death squad narco-paramilitaries. The latest arrests this week brings the figures to 51 Congressional representatives & Senators.

Before that, Uribe’s former chief of national intelligence & secret police and also his re-election campaign chief was arrested for ties to paramilitaries, and recently the Congressman who used to be President Uribe’s private secretary too.

Also, last month there was a nationwide march to commemorate the victims of state-connected and paramilitary violence, and Uribe’s adviser Jose Obdulio Gaviria declared in advance that it was “organized by the FARC [guerrillas]”, which of course prompted the completely non-existent paramilitaries to issue statements of agreement from their prison cells, and they followed up on Uribe’s adviser’s calls by killing 6 of the peace march’s organizers within a week of the march.

The fact that Uribe, mafia paramilitary sponsor supreme, occasionally feels that his henchmen grew too big for their britches and needed to be reeled in a bit (though they still dominate the VAAAAST majority of Colombia’s giant drugs trade) does not imply that Uribe won’t send out his boys to pull a job or two every now & then.

Scanning through the AM while driving yesterday, I heard a talk radio skeecher say that if liberals think Tibet should be free, then they have to also support the invasion of IRAQ, since, you know, we’re freeing Iraq. From China I guess.

Ummm… just so we’re totally clear here, we are NOT saying that the US military should invade Tibet. Repeat: DON’T INVADE TIBET. Jeezus these people are scary.

Last time I was in Colombia (before the recent brinkmanship) there was a lot of anti-Chavez rhetoric on talk radio. It was almost taken as a national duty to hate him. A few people that I talked to were puzzled by my reluctance to condemn the man. I explained that when we say that a foreign leader is dangerous, we mean that it is time to start dropping bombs on his country. That usually drew a stunned, horrified silence, followed by the equivalent of “Is the US out of it’s fucking mind?”

It’s like we see ourselves as the world’s mother, only the kind of mother that breaks up fights by breaking all the toys, shooting the baby, and burning the house down.

All sides agree that the killings are dramatically down, and no one accuses the government of orchestrating them. By the unions’ own count, the killings dropped from a high of 275 in 1996 to 39 last year. The government says 26.

“Please! Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who.”

Not to get all serious on S,N!, but the CCP uses a modern version of the Mandate of Heaven to justify their control over China — they’re going to restore China to its prior glory, which includes reclaiming territory that was “historically” part of China. Letting go of Tibet means letting go of that mandate; it also means letting of Taiwan, Xinjiang and the Spratly Islands, as China’s claims to all of them depend on the same historical argument. Ukraine was a modern province of 50 million people, with road and rail ties to a dozen Eastern European countries. Tibet is a gigantic, sparsely populated plateau, separated from every country but China by the highest mountains in the world. China is not letting Tibet go, at least while the CCP is in power.

You see El Cid that is, in fact, central to his point. Since Uribe didn’t personally order it, and the Army or Police didn’t carry it out means that we can just ignore it all. Heck, the government there is even better than Iraq’s!

Freedom Spread!!!

Pretend like Rome never fell, but endured up until the beginning of the 20th century, and then Mussolini took over. That’s pretty much China.

Except that Rome did have a strong tradition of democracy and limited government, which is why the Empire was so controversial. Even the title Emperor, or Imperator, was simply the term for a military commander. The dress, habits, and speech of the first emperors were carefully staged to give the appearance of modesty. They wanted to avoid any comparison to “Asiatic” kings, who were thought of as despotic, wasteful, and effeminate. Later emperors gave up all pretense, lengthening their robes, adding titles, and building massive palaces – but by that time Rome didn’t look much like the Rome that we imagine.
/pedantry

Mm, yeah, I knew someone would slam me on that. The metaphor was too strained- like, man, imagine if Rome was always a dictatorship and then lasted for a while and, and…

Also, Brad, that pic’s a little racist. Just sayin.

Today’s posts are bringing me way down. What this blog needs is more pictures of kittens with endearingly bad grammar.

I didn’t put that pic up there, but I don’t see what’s so terrible wrong with it. What am I missing?

Ceiling Cat is watching yur human rites violations, China!

The quote:

Above: The “emerging economic powerhouse” is making “steps toward democracy” — and other phrases from a 1998 issue of The Economist

…coupled with some mangled English makes it seem like Har, har, they can attempt to modernize, but they’re stupid and don’t know English!

For some reason my Feministe outrage-o-meter is tingling this morning. Could be that.

Here you go.

Crikey, I feel like the whole world has gone insane.

Pretty sure it actually HAS.

Um, or maybe only MOST of it.

But definitely the part I live in.

Shit…

mikey

I think it’s more that Gavin’s making fun of the Economist’s naive belief that economic modernization will automatically bring about human rights. That’s my take on it, anyway.

Eh, fair enough.

Thanks again for reminding me why I only visit Frum (paging Dr. Freud) when he is actually making sense.

The Economist has some pretty shitty caption writers. I remember one picture of a Japanese woman who was juggling two grocery bags and a briefcase and had fallen asleep standing up on the subway. Someone thought it would be funny to write underneath, “Time for the Japanese consumer to wake up.” It went with an article on how the Japanese were “oversaving” and “underspending”.

Hah.
Haha.
Hahaha.

I fucking hate those bastards sometimes.

More Schumacher-Matos:

The virtual elimination in 1991 of duties on Colombian flowers, textiles, and other products was done to help wean Colombia from violence and drugs.

Yes, the opium poppy is a flowering plant, and its cultivation and heroin production in Colombia have in recent years…wait, never mind.

A little more Schumacher-Matos:

US goods, however, still face tariffs of 35 percent and higher. Under the new agreement, 80 percent of US auto parts, medical equipment, and farm and other products will be duty free immediately. The rest will be phased in over 10 years.

That’s right. Let us kill off Colombia’s long-established auto parts and farming tools industries and its growing biomedical industry. That’ll be the drug trade’s death knell for sure!

…coupled with some mangled English makes it seem like Har, har, they can attempt to modernize, but they’re stupid and don’t know English!

Well, someone in China keeps posting signs like that.

Honestly, I think Drum gets everything but the obvious: The US can’t seriously pressure China on human rights, because China has been floating the US economy with its bond purchases. Piss them off too much, and pfft! goes the balloon.

There’s an old saying: if you lend someone a thousand bucks, she is your customer. If you loan her a million bucks, she is your partner. We are China’s partner in the sense that when a restaurant owner can’t pay back Tony Soprano, Tony becomes his partner.

We have no say in our own economic future, and we certainly have no say in how China behaves with respect to human rights. As soon as China has picked our economy clean to the point where it believes it will no longer make any money off of floating our debt, China will simply light a match to our economy by doing business solely in Euros.

The United States won’t lift a finger to embarass China. Hopefully some of athletes at the Olympics do.

[changed the graphic, btw]

Well, someone in China keeps posting signs like that.

True, and cool guys here in America keep getting Chinese character tats that read “I enjoy the comforting embrace of a warm gopher” and the like. It’s like a cultural ignorance exchange program.

What do you have against warm gophers?

http://www.esatclear.ie/~irish.trade/bj000004.htm?id=4

#4 should be how things are done at SN!

Tried to send link, but something happened…

ACTUAL ENGLISH SUBTITLES USED IN FILMS MADE IN HONG KONG

1. I am damn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.
2. Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.
3. Gun wounds again?
4. Same old rules: no eyes, no groin.
5. A normal person wouldn’t steal pituitaries.
6. Damn, I’ll burn you into a BBQ chicken!
7. Take my advice, or I’ll spank you without pants.
8. Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?
9. Quiet or I’ll blow your throat up.
10. You always use violence. I should’ve ordered glutinous rice chicken.
11. I’ll fire aimlessly if you don’t come out!
12. You daring lousy guy.
13. Beat him out of recognizable shape!
14. I have been scared shitless too much lately.
15. I got knife scars more than the number of your leg’s hair!
16. Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.
17. The bullets inside are very hot. Why do I feel so cold?
18. How can you use my intestines as a gift?

“2. Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.”

Ohh, that’s from “Pettycab Driver”! Just how many characters did Sammo Hung play who were named “Fatty” anyway?

All of them.

You honestly believe that supporting Palestinian rights and opposing Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is somehow incompatible with a two-state solution?

Um, hello? You’re dealing with someone who thinks that opposing corporate socialism = communism, which is also fascism.

Conservatives: not qualified to speak.
.

OT: Gav and/or Brad,

Could you kindly post a planning post for the the upcoming Boston-area Sadlython?

I saw the Bay-area one and got jealous. Well, and then Gavin’s Financeé started twisting my arm and you know how that goes (details are down there if you wish to view the bloody mess).

Thanks!

D.N. Nation,

But I do enjoy the comforting embrace of a warm gopher!

I bashed China. But it was my Mom’s and she had really pissed me off.

Doodle–I know, dammit, I used to live in the SF area. My family is still there, but they’re sort of in the family plot.

Grand Moff–that won’t stop em. I’ve been recently diagnosed with liberalism brought on by my (finally) diagnosed trigeminal neuralgia (which I wrote to the staff here under the influence of a med that’s not supposed to make you that spacey, but it did me, very sorry staff). Seriously, I don’t grow politically through thought and research and analysis, I most certainly do have the tumor that I am going to have to pay a fortune to rule out.

Oh well, comment of teh week at the other blog, and more fun for me. At least I get a laugh out of it. We are all also too ignorant about anti-Semitism to talk about it, not just matters dealing with China.

One contard would’ve talked more about it with me, but didn’t want “to degrenate me”…..ROFLMAO….
LAWNGUYLANDER, for you that one is a must read.

Can I come if I live-blog it? The SadlyThon? I won’t degrenate anyone, I promise!

Brad–are you a big fan of Engrish? I have some great stationary for you if so.

…and I enjoy the comforting embrace of a pasty human teenager.

Speaking of mocking magazines, I have a 3 year gift subscription to National Review due to my propensity to slip into imitations of WFB Jr. Living WFB Jr., things just got REALLY boring unfortunately in that dept.

Anyway, it can be accessed online if I can get my code to work (which I cannot, but an email promises to solve everything), the print version that is. Pantload has some real winners lately on Obama. At least the other Obamaphobe makes some points, Pantload just cuts and pastes quotes and throws in some insults here and there.

If you guys want it, just email me. I think we have about a year and 1/2 left to have fun with extra articles from the print edition, and I know no better hands to put it in that you guys here.

The fact is, gophers are a pleasant treat for the cleansed palate and the loving soul out here in the Heartland, a place that both is more in touch with nature than the coastal ivory tower elites AND is doing a better job of getting rid of bad nature while replacing it with parking lots, which are better for the economy because the American Dream is car and house ownership and nothing else is allowed or it’s anti-freedom, and big box stores, which are better for the economy because you can find items for cheap, which is the only reason people exist, according to Hoover Institute economist Thomas Sowell, who is right.

Lookee here, everybody! Matt McMahon and Gary Ruppert have achieved oneness!

At least that’ll make MM less wordy, anyway.

We are the troll. Resistance is futile.

The fact is, this post is lame.

True Fun Fact: Kevin Drum is 2.8 times more “reasonable” when posting an entry in his boat shoes.

The Troll. This is sad. Way too obsessed with being a troll.

Does that mean that they made a roll there at one point?

I have a really negative opinion of the Tibetan independence movement.

It’s also worth pointing out that, like them, Falun Gong also believe that homosexuality is some kind of punishment from the heavens for our backwardness and that democracy is an affront.

Close study of the histories of the post-Soviet states shows them turfing out the Enlightenment to spite the commies – that is, the Soviets brought them all of that tyrannous communism and abortion and secularism and racial equality, so they owe it to their glorious national legacy to be rid of it. Mister Jefferson, tear down that wall! And the sad thing is, you can always, always, always retroactively identify that in protestors against the totalitarian regimes.

The Soviet Union was a vile state and deserved to go quickly, but the people who spearheaded the opposition to it were (and still are, if you look up interviews or articles by the smug, historically-vindicated, and wealthy survivors) utter wingnuts. They give portentious interviews about the deadly communist dangers of PBS, Islamofascism, and public utilities. The left in the USSR generally tried to work within the system, and was pretty ruthlessly crushed by it – something the samizdatists generally accepted if not openly abetted, because it meant less competition when the Cold War was over.

If the Chinese Communist Party were to fall tomorrow, within ten years the government would make the 30s Guomindang and the 00s Republican Party blush. It doesn’t matter that communism imperfectly articulates and adopts the values of the enlightenment; what matters is that its opponents are drawn from the opponents of the enlightenment, and a fascist is a fascist in any country. The only difference is that, where here we recognize them pretty readily as assholes, in China now or Russia twenty years ago they’re (pretty justifiably, in the long run) picked on by the state instead of just pretending to be.

Long story short: don’t jump aboard any Goddamn liberation bandwagons, especially when they’re basically looking for a return to some kind of mythical prehistoric theocratic idyll. They will invariably make an ass of you. And be especially wary when they make high and mighty claims about horrible human rights abuses, because wingnuts do not make these claims to decry them – they make them as a hedge against future action. Just like Foley with his epehebes, Falun Gong’s pious concern for political prisoners is a pretty sure-fire indicator that when they’re part of the governing coalition they’re going to crack some democrat skull, and probably steal some democrat organs while they’re at it.

Fuckin’ pwogs.

Also, Brad, that pic’s a little racist. Just sayin.

Again with the pearl clutching, D.N.?

Wouldn’t something need to be about race to be racist?

Language-ist, maybe. But racist?

Sadly, No!

Lacist?

The fact is, the gopher is the self-hating liberal gerbil

I’m liking Guageist.

As in, “OMG! Showing funny translation errors is, like, totally Guageist!!11!”

That’s some smelly bait there, alec, but I just had lunch.

What’s more, if we are going to bash China, Darfur is a better topic than usual to bash them about. Unlike Tibet, which China will flatly never give in on, their behavior in Darfur is quite possibly malleable.

Koncern troll iz koncerned.

Long story short: don’t jump aboard any Goddamn liberation bandwagons, especially when they’re basically looking for a return to some kind of mythical prehistoric theocratic idyll.

I’m suspicious of the Free Tibet movement for the same reason: Buddhists in Tibet ran a serfdom prior to the Chinese invasion.

Nevertheless folks who speak language X often seem to be unhappy when folks who speak language Y invade their country, have a cultural revolution on them, and generally beat them about the head with sticks when they feel it necessary. The fact that some hippies have stupid ideas about Tibet doesn’t make the Tibetan desire for independence go away.

The Soviet Union was a vile state and deserved to go quickly, but the people who spearheaded the opposition to it were (and still are, if you look up interviews or articles by the smug, historically-vindicated, and wealthy survivors) utter wingnuts.

Yeah, well, so? Wingnuts or not, did they not agree with you about “vile state” and “deserved to go quickly”? And did they not attempt to do something about it? As opposed to, say…

The left in the USSR generally tried to work within the system, and was pretty ruthlessly crushed by it

Congrats for being suckers, guys! Well done.

Took part in a Free Burma meeting in D.C. a few years ago, and the main message Burman cast-offs seemed to all espouse was this: Our dear liberal friends in these here United States…stop pussy-footing around with the vicious regime and advocate for its complete fucking removal.

The only difference is that, where here we recognize them pretty readily as assholes, in China now or Russia twenty years ago they’re (pretty justifiably, in the long run) picked on by the state instead of just pretending to be.

Justifiably?

I’ll also add that the “justifiable” shakedowns of uber-wingnuts in China and Russia seemed to have a knack for destroying hundreds of millions of average folks in the wake. I heard a lot of this quasi-moral justifications for things like the ol’ Cultural Revolution during my college days, and sorry, no one has yet to remove it from the “no, this is complete bullshit” portion of my brain. Like it or not, you’re only getting the whole of your info on the eeevil conservative threat from the fear-mongering governments themselves. Remind you of some country’s current administration, and some country’s eeevil Islamic threat? It should.

The problem is that the innocents get killed either which way; anyone who works for a solution we’d actually want to see there gets shot at by both parties. The opposition gets the chance to canonize itself; the establishment gets the chance to consolidate itself.

I’m much less willing to defend China than I am to defend the Soviet Union (which is itself pretty shitty), largely because Maoism is a kludged-together hodgepodge of political virtues from a single deeply flawed mind, but it’s a damned sight better than the opposition. Besides the student radicals (who always wind up finding their way in front of machine guns any which way), the people behind the movement for liberation and freedom and peace and love and so on are the equivalent of Ron Paul as an opposite pole to George Bush.

In a free China, people would still be shot in the back of the neck for fairly moderate offenses. It’s just that the local governments would have the chance to add blasphemy to those offenses.

Freedom on the march, as per usual.

In a free China, people would still be shot in the back of the neck for fairly moderate offenses.

Kevin?

Nevertheless folks who speak language X often seem to be unhappy when folks who speak language Y invade their country, have a cultural revolution on them, and generally beat them about the head with sticks when they feel it necessary.
I’d agree with you unreservedly, except I don’t happen to speak any Navajo.

The problem is the actors in question – it’s not their Han (and especially not the Hui, who have little to do with the Chinese government) who culturally revolutionized their uncles and grandparents. It’s the Chinese government.

I understand the motivation behind beating the shit out of a random Chinese guy because you’re mad about what his countrymen did to you. Doesn’t make it acceptable.

And the general tendency in a riot situation for that kind of thing to happen makes it basically necessary for there to be police presence. I’m not a fan of repression, but if it’s that or race riots, sign me the fuck up.

I’m not sure what you do with China, honestly. Its history is as solid of an example of boot on the face…forever as you’ll find on this planet.

but it’s a damned sight better than the opposition

See, I’ve always just considered Mao and Chiang Kai-shek as the types that deserve to gnaw on each other in the icy pit of the 9th circle and have been done with it. Damned sight better? Meh.

I’m not a fan of repression, but if it’s that or race riots, sign me the fuck up.

Iraq awaits.

In a free China, people would still be shot in the back of the neck for fairly moderate offenses.

Kevin?

The funny thing is that the entire PR campaign for it is basically Bushy – ‘Strike Hard’ and all that, all kinds of nonsense about hardened criminals and the importance of justice.

China’s fascist, no two ways about it. I’m just waiting for the opposition to do a better job of offering a better country; in Eastern Europe, we find the situation basically unchanged from the 80s, except the Communists are blacklisted, the Americans are parking nukes in their backyards, and the intolerably wealthy in an ocean of austerity are capitalist rather than socialist apparatchiks.

China is the world’s largest country and turning that over to fascism with a human face is basically unacceptable. I’m honestly more comfortable with a brutal, repressive government that makes no pretenses of being just (focusing more, as it does, on a twisted parody of ‘fair’) than a brutal, repressive government that everyone sings hosannas for.

in Eastern Europe, we find the situation basically unchanged from the 80s, except the Communists are blacklisted, the Americans are parking nukes in their backyards, and the intolerably wealthy in an ocean of austerity are capitalist rather than socialist apparatchiks.

And yet I can stand out in the public square and bleat out a “fuck all ya’ll” and not get nearly the same treatment that would be handed to me in decades past.

See, I’ve always just considered Mao and Chiang Kai-shek as the types that deserve to gnaw on each other in the icy pit of the 9th circle and have been done with it. Damned sight better? Meh.

Eh, fair. I guess ‘damned sight better’ by virtue of you don’t have to kill a hundred million people to get there, although I’m severely reserved about the idea that the mainstream Chinese opposition would be acceptable in power – they basically assent to the CCP’s administrative prerogatives on everything of substance. Like, you know, death by assault rifle.

And yet I can stand out in the public square and bleat out a “fuck all ya’ll” and not get nearly the same treatment that would be handed to me in decades past.

Capitalists are just more realistic about the kind of free speech that needs to be controlled; they’ve never had any use for the weird paranoiac baggage of Marxism, so not so much throwing people into hard labor camps for a little harmless raging against the machine.

On this we can probably agree: China now is, almost despite itself, a workable solution. Kick all the commies out, redo everything under the hand of the opposition and you’d get more decades of purges, civil strife, and the like. And then the commies would come back and we’d do it all over again.

The world’s an awful place, come to think. I need Matt McMahon post to brighten my day.

You know what we need after all of this? Swank. That little twisted-up phalangist trying to grasp at ideas two or three levels of sapience above him always brightens my day; it’s like watching a retarded dog play football, and for some reason he’s the quarterback. Everybody wins!

The fact is, here in the Heartland, we live by the same old rules as our Founding Fathers intended: no eyes, no groin

no groin

Marxist swine.

I’m just waiting for the opposition to do a better job of offering a better country

I am once again reminded of Iraq and the traditional response to the hippies.

Retroactive semi-apology: there are a couple of things I’ve basically got a strong contrarian streak on (macroprojects [for], nuclear power [for, with reservations], Sinophobia [against], the Dalai Lama [execrate], bad comedies [don’t really mind], &c.), and occasionally, like lately or when there was more discussion about Three Gorges, they form into a sort of perfect storm and I find myself in a puddle of froth all day long reading people who I normally love.

Between that and an academic bias in favor of political philosophy – a discipline in which the fact that Stalin convicted his enemies in show trials (legalism) and Hitler simply had them summarily killed (absolutism) is a meaningful distinction instead of an administrative triviality – I can sometimes approach incendiary issues in a particularly callow fashion. Didn’t mean to be flippant about human life; simply pointing out in a far more elliptical fashion than the situation actually called for that all things considered there’s far too little guarantee that the replacement would be tolerable to go ahead and fuck with the current system in China, which at least has a remarkable degree of stability going for it.

That’s the only thing you can ever say for tenacious autocracies – they’re stable. Stable is necessary under a lot of circumstances, and disrupting it needs to be balanced out by a credible gain. Latin America had a hundred years of chaos (or, at least, solitude) before stable institutions developed, largely because of the exact cycle of coup and counter-coup and revolution and reaction that dominated its first independent century. Give that to a billion people and you’ll turn a nasty but livable situation into Hell on Earth.

I am once again reminded of Iraq and the traditional response to the hippies.

If we were to hold the Iraq analogy, the current situation could be likened to the Saddam regime (albeit without sanctions killing hundreds of thousands) and the possibility of an opposition government basically like that offered by Chalabi.

China’s not quite as green and fertile territory for authoritarianism as Iraq is (group ethnicity is intimately tied to a shared nationality and has been since before Europe had heard of the nation, and with the exception of a few regions in the nethers of the country the idea of racialized inter-tribal warfare is absurd now), but like Baathist Iraq it at least keeps people from slitting each other’s throats pretty well.

I had vaguely courted with the liberal hawk argument for a while after the war became a fait accompli, but I was against it from the word go and after a few weeks of solid beating by acquaintances I accepted the idea that armed intervention isn’t going to produce a better country no matter what you do (peacekeeping is a possibility, but that wasn’t our angle) and the main goal for the occupation of Iraq was aimless looting. Hell, I was one of the people in 2003 having hapless arguments on message boards about Saddam Hussein posing no further threat to anyone and having to deal with snide comments made about Hans Blix. That was, of course, about a million and a half lives and a trillion dollars ago. Good times!

Remind you of some country’s current administration, and some country’s eeevil Islamic threat? It should.

Wait. You think China’s weekly announcements that they’ve foiled yet another terrist plot are … fibs?!

The fact is, what the fuck is going on here? The fact of the matter is, this thread is turning into a damn political philosophy lecture, and it blows.

Clarity: I was shouting at a growing majority until 2004 or so, silently acquiesced to trying to make things work around then, and within the year realized there was no real hope of it and went back to my original purity. I remember we were having a nice dinner when Bush announced the ultimatum, with my grandparents, and I called him an idiot; after a few months I despaired of changing the course of history and at least hoped for a humane Iraq to succeed the present one. I still regret the lapse, but I never accepted for a second that Iraq had WMDs or any real intentions to develop them, nor that there was any reason to invade Iraq except simple corporate rapine.

And honestly, if any corporation exists that can loot China on the scale the contractors have Iraq, by God, it seems almost as if they’ll have wanted it more. But that’s neither here nor there.

Alec, I think you’re overestimating what anybody thinks can happen to China. I don’t think most people imagine an overnight visit from the Blue Fairy will do the trick. The Free Tibet delusionals simply want China out as far as I know, and you and I just probably wish China was a little less brutal.

Anyway, if you write more about the Three Gorges I’d be interested.

China’s had a stranglehold on Tibet ever since the early Manchu emperors (and had eyes for it centuries before that). They ain’t going anywhere.

alec said,

I remember we were having a nice dinner when Bush announced the ultimatum, with my grandparents

We’d like all you nice folks to know we had absolutely nothing to do with Bush’s ultimatum. We were just standing there beside him.

Thanks a lot for throwing us under the bus, alec, you shithead. Oh and by the way, you’re illegitimate.

Well, the Three Gorges thing is mostly provincial – having been raised in Las Vegas, I find it difficult to fault a dam.

And like the Hoover Dam, it controls a river prone to flooding and causing huge amounts of misery and offers a chance to generate massive amounts of irrigation and fairly clean power from it, and above and beyond that 3G offers a chance to lessen the impact of both the intensely destructive coal-fire default in Chinese power generation and the horrible meddling of Mary Worth.

Megaprojects suffer from one serious problem, one that I do intend to write up after I’m back from our field trip to Zion National Park – that is, in a capitalist/marketroid system they’re contracted at bottom dollar and often sold out once they become difficult to maintain. Hoover Dam was overbuilt; it could have been built for half the price, but maintenance would have cost several times more, and it wouldn’t be turning a profit today. Nowadays the assumption that Gubmint Ain’t Work (TM) is so powerful that we neglect government involvement even in cases where it’s really the only sane option – hydro and nuclear plants, large-scale roads, things like that.

A modern Hoover Dam would have been sold to Edison once it got close to turning a profit, because competing with private industry is wrooooong. And while 3G is obviously going to primarily benefit the wealthy assholes who gain the most from China’s political system, it’s also going to provide much cheaper and better power and water to the public. In an ideal system we’d all benefit from the Hoover Dam instead of, you know, mostly the defense industry (who get most of the fat l00tz from government surpluses), but it’s better than not having one at all.

Which is an unsatisfying conclusion for 3G, though – it drove a species extinct. No matter how generally in favor of dams I am or how heavily I normally weigh human interests against the environment (although I’d ideally want to see them competing as little as possible), there’s no condoning that. It’s a complex issue, not unlike passive-aggressively driving your stalker to alcohol and suicide or adopting someone else’s dog as your own or flipping out when some other biddy horns into your advice game. In conclusion, the next time you’re in Vietnam to help injured orphans and Hu Jintao tries to pull you out to hang around sexlessly on the Bum Boat, you might just want to blow him off.

My grandpa ran off from the seminary to fuck a nurse. I don’t think I could get any more illegitimate than that, but I do enjoy a good challenge.

In conclusion, the next time you’re in Vietnam to help injured orphans and Hu Jintao tries to pull you out to hang around sexlessly on the Bum Boat, you might just want to blow him off.

I was with you up until there.

You honestly believe that supporting Palestinian rights and opposing Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is somehow incompatible with a two-state solution?

In the interests of being fair and balanced, I’ll give the argument: a two state solution implies the continued existence of Israel. In order for Israel to continue to exist, it must defend itself, even if it means trampling on Palestinian rights.

While Palestinians may perceive the half-assed pseudo-conciliations made by Israel as indicating a lack of good faith (and hence they are met with a certain degree of backlash in and of themselves), as far as many in Israel (and amongst Israel’s defenders) are concerned, these conciliatory gestures are also testing the waters for potential future negotiations (and the assumption that Israel’s not acting on good faith does rather rankle and seem anti-Semitic … nu? why should Israel even bother to act on good faith then?). And what is the result, as seen from the Israeli perspective, of “giving them an inch”? Well … certainly not good for Israel.

So, to some degree, a two-state solution does mean Israel ought to have the same right that every other country has to defend itself. And then might include trampling on Palestinians who happen to be in the way. A good liberal ought to disagree with the attitude taken by many in Israel (and certainly many of its supporters here in the USA), but anybody who fails to understand whence comes this position (and willfully lacks empathy toward Israel) is hardly a liberal (we define ourselves in part by our empathy … nu? those who so conveniently lack empathy where Israel is concerned have a double standard redolent of anti-Semitism, don’t they?).

This discussion needs to be boiled down to a Jet Li movie, so I can understand it.

Why is this double standard different from all other double standards?

Peores transgresiones de Hussein Obama son blanqueadas sistemáticamente por la prensa. Para contrarrestar esa cal, yo utilizaré el resto de mi espacio para aquí exponer Hussein para que él es realmente. Antes comienzo, sin embargo, yo debo indicar eso comprender qué forma especialmente malísima de Hussein de Comstockism ha abarcado como un movimiento y como un sistema de la regla, nosotros tenemos que mirar su contexto y el desarrollo históricos como una forma de la política ingenua que surgió primero en el siglo xx temprano Europa en respuesta al trastorno social rápido, la devastación de primera Guerra mundial, y de la Revolución bolchevique. Si el pasado es cualquier indicación del futuro, él procurará una vez más dirigir personas hacia la iniquidad y el pecado. El discute esa verdad es solamente un social construye. Para mantener esta tesis, Hussein ha tenido naturalmente que mover con pala lejos una montaña de la evidencia, que él hace por el desesperado conveniente de reclamar que los gobiernos deben tener el derecho de mentir a sus propios sujetos o a otros gobiernos. Ha sido dicho que ese Dadaísmo repugnante y corrompe el egotismo es un par emparejado. Eso tiene sentido a mí. Creo que es verdad. Pero implica verdaderamente que usted no debe preguntar, “Cuándo vendrá él limpio y admite que él piensa dominar la tierra entera y tomar la posesión de toda su riqueza”?, sino, “por qué puede no él alivia su sentido del dolor de insuficiencia sin tener que rendir este país a las fuerzas del mal, a la opresión, y a la tiranía”?. La última pregunta es el mejor de preguntar porque convencernos que él actúa en el nombre de la igualdad y la justicia social, Hussein a menudo gira a la artimaña vieja del propagandista de comparar los resultados produjeron por causas enteramente diferentes. Ahora que yo le he dicho lo que pienso, permite que mí terminar esta carta indicando que pienso completamente presentar otro paradigma en la oposición a proyectos del ginebra-moviendo de Hussein Obama. Permita el temblor de Hussein. Y aunque los cielos se caen, permitan hay la justicia.

The last I read of the history of damming those rivers it was one of failure after failure – collapses of the dams – and that the Three Gorges was the Great White Whale for the chief dambuilder. It made me worry about the safety of the thing, like the Aswan Dam which is built on a fault in addition to completely fucking up the water table (in a good way I think) for North Africa. If the quake ever happens in Egypt everything along the Nile is gone.

Government megaprojects can be nice and all, but when embarked upon by governments nobody can say no to very bad things can happen.

China’s had a stranglehold on Tibet ever since the early Manchu emperors (and had eyes for it centuries before that). They ain’t going anywhere.

Exactly right – the Chinese aren’t just gassing when they say the claim to Tibet is from time immemorial, and the ROC similarly considers Tibet (along with, weirdly enough, Mongolia) an integral part of Chinese territory. The Dalai Lama’s decision to date the Chinese occupation from either the Communist accession to power or the failed uprising in the 50s is a tactical one – it ties Tibetan independence intimately with a struggle against the PROC, which has always been the red-headed stepchild of the civilized world. (For good reason, to be entirely fair – but the only reason the cliques of the 20s didn’t outdo Mao in brutality is that they had so much less to work with.) Tibet has, for all political purposes (except those of the Tibetan church, which has a somewhat tenuous relationship with history), been a backwater province of China since before America existed.

There’s no scholarly basis to this, but my observation suggests that in general ethnic groups within the Chinese sphere of influence generally either broke away from Beijing or accreted towards it during the chaotic 16th and 17th centuries; Annam revolted and formally severed all ties except the royal family’s, so the relationship with China became international rather than intranational. The various ethnic groups of the south, on the other hand, are pretty irrevocably Chinese. Tibet is one of two marginal cases – the other being Xinjiang (and Mongolia, sort of, kind of) where the Chinese government didn’t assert itself actively but the local polities didn’t really form any kind of unified cultural entity, so when the Chinese state was able to assert itself within its own borders again, there was little organized opposition by either the Muslim regions of China or Tibet to the Chinese government.

In essence, this is why the Manchurians lack a domestic constituency for separatism but the Vietnamese wouldn’t accept Chinese domination on their lives. As I said, no scholarship behind it – but I’d stand by the analysis. 1500-1700 seems about right for the accretion of the Chinese ethnicities into a single over-nation.

t4:

Read here, or really anywhere on the Comics Curmudgeon. It’s a beautiful blog.

Righteous Bubba,

Pardon me while I fix your comment.

Government megaprojects can be nice and all, but when embarked upon by governments nobody can say no to, without being dismissed as a DFH, very bad things can happen.

So, to some degree, a two-state solution does mean Israel ought to have the same right that every other country has to defend itself. And then might include trampling on Palestinians who happen to be in the way.

Well, let’s say that Colombia were to argue that Venezuela is funding FARC and thereby threatening their existence (which they do). Does that give Colombia the right to occupy Venezuela, set up internal checkpoints, demolish blocks of houses and blockade shipping in and out of the country? I don’t see how this is a right that every other country has. Israel’s actions would be an international concern, no matter what states happened to be involved.

Government megaprojects can be nice and all, but when embarked upon by governments nobody can say no to very bad things can happen.

Well, yeah – but honestly, it’s not like we’re that much better. Up until Dominy made the incomprehensibly stupid decision to suggest damming the fucking Grand Canyon, there was little to no public constituency behind the people desperately trying to get Reclamation to stop flooding every freaking canyon on the Colorado, or really any canyon that passed its jaundiced eye. Cadillac Desert is a hell of a read, and it’s something I’m still wrestling with.

The big problem with public decision-making is that in terms of megaprojects, the best system to use is a sort of non-democratic technocracy – that is, the people have at least some kind of say, but the public debate needs to be between learned women and men unencumbered by conflicts of interest. America lacks even the basic infrastructure for that – no free college, no clear list of schools government agencies can cold-call graduates from to find someone capable of doing a certain job – but we need one if we’re to stop behaving like a third-world country where market value and personal connections decide everything. It’s acceptable to run representative government as a popularity contest, but not engineering.

Pardon me while I fix your comment.

Heh. Or boo hoo I suppose. We’re at least hoping there’s a no coming along soon.

In a free China, people would still be shot in the back of the neck for fairly moderate offenses.

Oh yeah? Well in Soviet Russia, neck shoots you!

Or… something…

So, to some degree, a two-state solution does mean Israel ought to have the same right that every other country has to defend itself. And then might include trampling on Palestinians who happen to be in the way.

Israel has as much right to defend itself as any other state, but no more. No country is entitled to genocide ‘in self-defense’ (as genocide’s perpetrators invariably claim), and no condition of war merits a suspension of the basic rights of man and the basic standards of international diplomacy.

A two-state solution would mean that the Israeli government could not depend on bombarding the provisional headquarters of the Palestinian government to ruins if talks went sour. A permanent state of war between two countries without anything like a natural border is horrifying.

Preemptive strike fun time: there’s a major difference between a system of appropriate governance by experts (the application of democratically determined policy objectives) and a system of governance by lobbyists (the application of policy objectives determined by fat old white guys). The latter is why we’re in Iraq, not the former. Technocracies can go wrong, but they don’t go as far and as reliably wrong as kleptocracies.

I think the best outcome there is for Israel-Palestine would be for Israel to withdraw its settlements, go back to the ’67 borders and then build a large Berlin Wall-type structure along the borders to keep out suicide bombers, defend against rocket attacks, etc.

Israel has a right to retaliate against Hamas when they launch rockets at their towns. They don’t have the right to illegally settle on Palestinians’ land. We’re unfortunately dealing with a situation where you have two peoples who are completely traumatized and will likely hate each other forever. There’s no way to really make that go away; the best you can do is separate them and lower violence as much as possible.

The fact is, I can’t take this anymore. In the name of the Heartland, please stop.

Preemptive strike fun time: there’s a major difference between a system of appropriate governance by experts (the application of democratically determined policy objectives) and a system of governance by lobbyists (the application of policy objectives determined by fat old white guys). The latter is why we’re in Iraq, not the former.

Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack are some of the most highly-touted “experts” in modern America. Hate to break it to you, but they’re war-mongering buffoons.

Well, they’re “experts,” which is different than experts. Methinks alec was referring to a true standard of expert, rather than “a bunch of bloggers, cable news titans and op-ed trolls dig these doods.”

Then there is Mr. Bernard Lewis, the preeminent Orientalist of the Western World and a bigoted little shitface if there ever was one.

I’m so depressed that Edward Said died first.

Also, this place’s ability to fling back and forth between policy debates and troll wars is intriguing.

So, to some degree, a two-state solution does mean Israel ought to have the same right that every other country has to defend itself. And then might include trampling on Palestinians who happen to be in the way.

And the US has the right to defend itself by offering bounties for the capture of random guys in Iraq and Afghanistan, incarcerating said guys indefinitely with no recourse and — oh yeah — torturing them to extract bogus information. ‘Cuz, you know, 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11!

Happily, no!

Exactly, Pedestrian. The issue is not their right to defend themselves, but the disproportionately heavy-handed way they respond.

Someone throws a rock at me.

I respond by running them down with a Mack truck.

I may have been justified in retaliating, but the scale of my response will still land my ass in jail.

Well, yeah. The problem there is that the American policy establishment is history’s most inefficient brothel; other countries manage to conduct fairly decent foreign relations without discarding existing treaties, pissing all over long-standing allies, and pinning down and invading small, weak, unstable countries for no sound reason.

The debate in ethics & policy is usually framed something like one of my professors did – between Huntington (kill the Arabs lest they despoil our liberal democracy, and also Christendom) and Fukuyama (kill the Arabs so they’ll learn to love our liberal democracy, and perhaps Christendom). This is what the American academy churns out, and is also why you kind of have to hedge any talk about international cooperation against ‘realist’ idiocy.

America’s got uniquely shitty technocrats, and usually uses that as an excuse to hand governance over to even shittier (from the public perspective, anyhow) lobbyists. I don’t see it working as an indictment of technocracy per se – we’re not the only country with the power to do something like we’re doing in Iraq, we’re just the only one that is. (Even Russia, which is obscenely brusque when it comes to foreign relations, has stopped short of all-out war with its various weaker neighbors – and they have the legacy of the Russian-imperialist USSR to blame.)

The last comment was re. Hanlon and the other ‘experts’, just so it’s clear. I need me some sleep.

“What will he do as President? Will he support one at the expense of the other or be committed to a two-state solution? Toss a coin, you have a 50% chance of being right.”

Since, I assume, the correct answer is “committed to a two-state solution,” Jeralyn’s alternative of supporting Palestinians “at the expense” of Israel must be a solution worse than a two-state solution. Which is what? Give up all of Jerusalem? Tel Aviv? Leave entirely?

Shorter Jeralyn:

“What will Obama do? Will he help drive the Jews into the sea or be committed to a two-state solution? Toss a coin, you have a 50% chance of being right.”

Oh, and ‘ethics and policy’ is academic short(?)hand for ‘foreign policy’. I dunno how common the usage is, so there you are.

I guess the alternative is Jews in Space.

Another point to add is, how have Israel’s tactics against the Palestinians made Israel any safer? Bush gave Sharon a free hand to do whatever he wanted; the eventual result was that Sharon saw that merely trying to pummel the Palestinians was exacerbating the problem and decided to withdraw Gaza settlements. The idea that beating the crap out of someone will make them stop trying to hurt you every time just don’t hold up…

No country is entitled to genocide ‘in self-defense’ (as genocide’s perpetrators invariably claim), and no condition of war merits a suspension of the basic rights of man and the basic standards of international diplomacy. – alec

Define genocide.

If you mean actually killing off or attempting to kill of a whole ethnic group, religious group or other such group, no. But Israel is not attempting to do that. If you mean (as some have taken genocide to mean) mass deportations/population transfers and that sort of thing, tell this “no country is entitled to genocide” argument to the Karelians, Sudeten Germans, Poles and, for that matter, the Mizahi Jews.

Israel obtained control of the occupied territories fair and square, so to speak. And funny, how the rules changed about who can do what with their occupied territories just in time for Israel to have come into existence.

My characterization of the Likudnik-PLO (and now Hamas) dispute is a sort of mutually agreed total race war, which each side believes it can win. Most Israelis and Palestinians want nothing to do with it, and a good majority would be happy to give up about anything to make peace happen, but the dominant parties are perfectly content to engage in a sort of racialized duel to the death.

The genocidal comments from both sides of the line dovetail with a chilling beauty; maybe Obama, who is by all indications the least horrible asshole to be in the White House in a generation, might actually get things back on the difficult track to peace. (Obama’s basically inevitable – McCain’s a pathetic parody of everything the media claims him to be, and the illusion can’t hold up the whole election cycle.)

The idea that beating the crap out of someone destroying entire neighborhoods will make them stop trying to hurt you every time somehow reign a small number of radicals just don’t hold up…

Fixed.

Technocracies can go wrong, but they don’t go as far and as reliably wrong as kleptocracies. – alec

See! … you can say good things even about kleptocracies — they are far more reliable (in their wrongness, but far more reliable nonetheless) than technocracies. See! … those flappy egg-heads can’t do anything reliably, but kleptocrats are 100% reliable! 😉

McCain’s a pathetic parody of everything the media claims him to be – alec

McCain has completely jumped the shark into the realm of self-parody indeed. His speeches are pretty much: “let me give you some straight talk, my friends” and other McCain-esque catch-phrases strung together.

Population transfers are a really sketchy subject, but they don’t really fall under genocide – they usually make matters easier in that regard.

On the other hand, the Israeli state has engaged in a basically open-ended policy of ghettoization and bombardment for large areas of Palestine. It’s not genocide in the German sense, where a state clearly intends to destroy an ethnic group and carries out policies to achieve that end, but genocide in the slower, nastier, more difficult to resolve sense one finds in various parts of Africa – that is, ethnic cleansing jumped up by elements of state policy.

The attitude towards Palestinian lives has been unacceptably cavalier, and the problem with that is that the Palestinian territories are not independent. Israel has a prerogative to defend itself, but Palestine has no such countervailing prerogative. If Israel intends to rule over the territories for its own security, it’s going to have to suffer a lot of loss of life to justify that – it’s not acceptable to occupy a territory indefinitely and bleed it dry. That is textbook ethnic cleansing; if Palestine were an independent state at least it could be done under the color of warfare instead of tribal brutality.

Well, I don’t know if you were accepting Bernard Lewis as an example of an “expert”, but he happens to be British. In fact, the British Empire produced quite a few academics, engineers, and administrators who were highly gifted, yet utterly soulless in their treatment of the colonies.

The aristocrats who dominated politics until after WWII would have never let go of the colonies. Technocrats make very good despots if the unwashed masses don’t rise up and refuse to pay the bill. Sometimes all of the experts can not only be wrong, but god damned evil fucking wrong.

I think that after all this time we are still basically working on the model of the Roman Republic – functional oligarchy with a rarely exercised popular veto if things get too far out of hand.

Similarly, if there were massive numbers of Modocs living in the Imperial Valley and the United States refused to either grant them citizenship and allow free access to the country or grant them independence and treat them like any other country in diplomatic terms, the same situation would exist.

Considering how many people could subside on the fairly fertile areas of interior California – or, really, every nook and cranny of the US west of the Mississippi – that sort of thing could lead to an awful lot of deaths. Thank God it’s just a wacky hypothetical.

Another point to add is, how have Israel’s tactics against the Palestinians made Israel any safer? Bush gave Sharon a free hand to do whatever he wanted; the eventual result was that Sharon saw that merely trying to pummel the Palestinians was exacerbating the problem and decided to withdraw Gaza settlements. The idea that beating the crap out of someone will make them stop trying to hurt you every time just don’t hold up… – Brad

I certainly agree with you, but the counter-argument is “if Israel hadn’t used such strong armed tactics, imagine how much worse they’d be — by responding so severely, Israel shows it means business and thus is detering attacks, which would be more severe if Israel did not respond but rather showed its weakness”. The counter-argument is that when Israel does make a baby step (even if it is pretty much a pseudo-step), there is even more violence toward Israel (e.g. now that Israel has withdrawn its settlements from Gaza, there are more attacks from Gaza not fewer).

There is a lot of begging the question in the Likudnik arguments, that’s for sure. But one thing to remember is that the “tough-guy” rhetoric and actions from some in Israel betray an extreme amount of weakness (which is the ironic thing — the “bomb the heck out of Gaza” people think they are showing how strong Israel is which will ward off further attacks — but in reality they are showing how weak their side is) on the part of the “tough guys” — if the Palestinian cause is to go anywhere, baby steps undertaken by Israel (even if not 100% in good faith) need to be rewarded with less violence rather than punished with more violence.

Until then, many Israelis will feel that any backing down would disastrously weaken Israel’s position. A two state solution does, by definition, involve Israel, so Israel ought to be able to defend itself. And could you imagine what kind of response any nation would have if it were under the kind of barrages faced by Israel? We pretty much took out a government for a terrorist attack that, on a percent of population basis, was far less severe than what Israel faces rather often.

One doesn’t have to agree with what Israel does, but the lack of empathy to Israel is, well, disturbing …

DAS – OK, let’s get into this.

Here are, in my opinion, Israel’s options from here on out:

1.) Work toward a two-state solution

2.) Expel the Palestinians forcibly from the West Bank and Gaza

That’s pretty much it. They can’t keep up (and they’re finally starting to recognize this) their policy of saying that they’re occupying the territories and creating heavily-armed settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. It’s bad for Israeli security, it’s illegal under international law and it is in the long run completely unsustainable, unless they want to take in every Palestinian living in those territories as a citizen (and they don’t for obvious reasons). So what do they do?

My personal preference would be to have a two-state solution and a heavy barricade to protect against attacks. And stop trying to move onto the Palestinians’ land.

The counter-argument is that when Israel does make a baby step (even if it is pretty much a pseudo-step), there is even more violence toward Israel (e.g. now that Israel has withdrawn its settlements from Gaza, there are more attacks from Gaza not fewer).

The rocket attacks from Gaza, while certainly not an ideal situation, are vastly better than the scores of suicide bombers that struck Tel Aviv and the like in the early part of the decade.

The aristocrats who dominated politics until after WWII would have never let go of the colonies. Technocrats make very good despots if the unwashed masses don’t rise up and refuse to pay the bill. Sometimes all of the experts can not only be wrong, but god damned evil fucking wrong.

True enough; my favorite nonfiction tends to be in that genre (the Mismeasure of Man; Cadillac Desert; Debbie Does Dallas). But that’s a general characteristic of humanity; we’re a deeply irrational, vicious set of creatures. Perfectible, or close to it – I’m pretty sure that a society can exist where cruelty isn’t a part of day-to-day life and technology enables the common welfare and leisure instead of depriving from it – but still vicious and irrational.

For what it’s worth, communities of experts generally right themselves – scientists as a whole were all wrong about abiogenesis in the 17th century, but that’s changed considerably since then. On the other hand, non-scientific governance is usually dominated by random hits followed by horrible misses – Abolitionism is a feather in the cap of certain religious sects against the science of the day (but not most of them, at least not for a long time – the general trend among churchgoers seems to have been to accept slavery), but the same congregations went on to spearhead Prohibition and, when push came to shove, became the constituency for modern non-scientific racism.

The experts are generally deadly wrong when everyone else is; expertise isn’t a panacea. (Even the socialists of the imperial days were widely in favor of imperialism – it was simply how things worked. Positivism was a sort of universal calling in the 19th century.) On the other hand, they’re much less likely to be wrong than others, and collective/democratic decision-making does just as bad a job as expert-selection of reflecting the prejudices and stupidities of the day.

That is textbook ethnic cleansing; if Palestine were an independent state at least it could be done under the color of warfare instead of tribal brutality. – alec

If the Likudniks, neo-cons and similar types were half as clever as they think they are (and nobody is as stupid as someone convinced by stereotypes about his ethno-religious group that he’s clever), they would have unilaterally declared recognized Palestine as an independent state and when the first rocket flew into Israel said “that’s an act of war” and invaded it … deported all the inhabitants somewhere else, and when people complained, they could have responded “well, what about the Karelians, etc.”.

WordPress hates me, and I’ve got to go. Peace!

Brad,

I agree with you. Although some aspects of the pre-1967 borders are rather silly and some settlements must be kept (also, speaking as a Jew, any settlement that denies me access to the Western Wall and the Old City of Jerusalem, is straight out) … perhaps in exchange for some land within pre-1967 Israel. Of course, the big issue is water.

Still, as long as the perception is “we negotiate with those people, and they still attack us”, there ain’t going to be any progress on the Israeli side (I reckon Palestinians can and do say the same thing). What those on both sides who hold such attitudes need to realize is that their attitudes are allowing violent extremists to hold hostage (choice of words on purpose) the peace process. However, it would help if baby steps were meant with perceivable (having whole towns under siege by rocket fire may represent a lower death toll than suicide bombers, simply do to the ability of suicide bombers to actually blow themselves up in crowds of people rather than being lobbed randomly, but having whole towns under siege is not going to be perceived as progress) advantages.

Of course, Palestinians could argue that they also need to perceive incrimental peace dividends from the Israeli side, which they have not seen. However, when you look at historical precident, that Israel has not simply done #2 (pun intended) of your options, one could argue that Israel is being restrained. Anyway, if the goal is a two state solution, Israel is one of those states — and Israel was supposed to have included much of the occupied territories anyway (debatable, I know) … so to expect Israel to be chipped away into nothing is hardly to, in good faith, embrace a two state solution.

The problem in the Israeli/Palestine conflict is, of course, that each side feels that merely to accept the other side is a pretty huge compromise (and, don’t forget the water) — each side has a good reason to feel that they should have 100% of Israel/Palestine. How do you get people to take a “leap of faith” into a peace process with nothing to give them confidence that the other side won’t just take advantage of the peace process, regroup behind the walls erected, and then completely destroy the other side as soon as the slightest breech in the walls occurs?

WordPress hates me too … peace out man!

Fuck it all. I had a clever comment about WordPress eating my comment, but that one was devoured as well.

[gingerly submits]

If you mean (as some have taken genocide to mean) mass deportations/population transfers and that sort of thing, tell this “no country is entitled to genocide” argument to the Karelians

The Karelians called, and yes, they would like their country/autonomous area back if it’s no trouble, thanks! (What is this “tell it to the Karelians” argument supposed to demonstrate, anyway? The Karelians can’t have theirs back, so no one else should either?)

(also, speaking as a Jew, any settlement that denies me access to the Western Wall and the Old City of Jerusalem, is straight out)

Congratulations for being part of the problem. Hooray religionists!

mass deportations/population transfers and that sort of thing, tell this “no country is entitled to genocide” argument to the Karelians, Sudeten Germans, Poles and, for that matter, the Mizahi Jews.

It’s called ethnic cleansing. I can’t think of an instance where it’s *not* a wicked thing.

but the lack of empathy to Israel is, well, disturbing …

No, it’s not. An analogy: Whenever I read histories of Indians attacking the American frontier — or indeed of AIM “terrorists” attacking the FBI or seizing Alcatraz — I feel *no empathy for the other side* because it deserves none. The only thing I wish for in reading of such things is that the occupying, colonial power might have experienced more, not less, grief. Fuck ’em. Cold blooded? Yeah, well, when governments of sacred ethnic (be they white Xtian or white Jewish) groups stop taking what is not theirs, then we can talk.

I figured you’d show up for this one…

The Karelians called, and yes, they would like their country/autonomous area back if it’s no trouble, thanks!
The 422,000 Finns who left West Karelia in 1940 (after it became part of the Finno-Karelian SSR) are not a good example of a deportation, since they were not actually deported, or expelled, or threatened with bad consequences if they stayed where they were (apart from the generic threat of living under Uncle Joe Stalin).
What this thread needs is more irrelevant pedantry.

Cold blooded? Yeah, well, when governments of sacred ethnic (be they white Xtian or white Jewish) groups stop taking what is not theirs, then we can talk.

Goddam right, Mencken. When you get fucked, you fight.

How is this hard to grasp?

The americans got fucked in the late eighteenth century, and they fought.

The south africans got fucked for decades, and they fought.

On and on. You can’t swallow it? Lock and load. Fight them.

And now? If you’re getting fucked?

Put a mag in the rifle and fight….

mikey

I had a very long and well thought comment about how John Hawkins was right about the Palestinians being worse than Nazis and how Israel would be justified in exterminating them but wordpress ate it. You guys need to change that thing it keeps eating comments.

Never mind the mean things all those hippies in the next thread are saying about you, WordPress ol’ pal. I love you more than cornflakes for what you did to Matt’s comment.

DAS: I don’t see people here being terribly unsympathetic to Israel, but to the extent that there is such a sentiment I think it’s because of the fact that the mainstream discourse on the subject is even less sympathetic to Palestinians.

In the American discourse, anything that Israel does to Palestinians is justifiable.

There’s a sort of feeling, I think, that everybody already pretty much knows how much shit Israel has to deal with, but that nobody cares about Palestinians dealing with more-or-less the same thing.

China is the most imperialist nation in the history of the world. They brutalize there own people, cheat on trade deals and have imperial ambitions in every corner of the globe such as Taiwan, Japan and Panama. They actually sent Chinese Paramilitary troops to the United States, Great Britain and France because of anti-Chinese demonstrations in those countries. They deserve the demonstrations and they deserve an embargo. Establishing permanant normal trade relations with them was a bad idea.

As the capital city of China, Beijing is the center of national politics
and culture, and a hub of Chinese international interaction.

Alongside Xian, Luoyang, Kaifeng, Nanjing and Hangzhou, Beijing is one of
the Six Ancient Cities in China. In addition, Beijing was
the host city of the 2008 Summer Olympics. With a population of
about 17 million people, Beijing contains 18 districts and counties,
which are further subdivided into 273 lower (third)-level
administrative units at the township level. Situated at the northwest edge of the North China
Plain, Beijing City is next to Tianjin City, to its southeast.
The landform of this city basically falls away from northwest
to southeast. Beijing was also known as Peking by the Western world before 1949.
It is one of the famed ancient cities in the world. With more than
two-thousand years of history, Beijing City is a place of military
importance. It had consistently been the capital of the Liao, Jin, Yuan, Ming and
Qing dynasties. In the early nineteen-twenties, Beijing became the cradle of Chinese new democratic revolution.
The May Fourth Movement against imperialism and feudalism began here in 1919.
And in Oct. 1, 1949, Beijing became the capital city of the PRC, which opened a new page in
this ancient city. Beijing boasts abundant tourist resources; ancient architecture,
royal gardens, mansions, towers, temples, palaces, and
modern structures, including the world-class Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Summer Palace and the Great
Wall at Badaling. With such a mature ability in
receiving tourists, Beijing will be an ideal tour destination to get more of
an idea of China as a country, and moreover as a cultural gathering place for artists and musicians.
Airlines connect Beijing with more than 110 cities at home and abroad, while the city
boasts a fine railroad and highway system
for local travelers. Urban construction has brought new changes to Beijing, resulting in a unique combination of ancient
civilization and modern metropolis.