I am not responsible for the despicable Mark Rawson's fear and loathing at having his socialist premises attacked, nor am I responsible for his consequent and deliberate conflation of what is cultural and ethical with what is ethnic. His psychological need to slander is entirely his personal problem and I take no interest in that now - except to point out that my appropriation of Lenin's "Who, Whom?" is a better fit to his thinly veiled threat than is his "rule of law" which he himself would see corrupted simply to try to intimidate me. Ain't gonna happen.
Update: Turton makes a point with a prima facie similarity to my "invasion" comment... "Well, language is an important part of the long-term KMT colonization program, so it is important to keep track of its ins and outs."... except the difference being that Turton does seem to be actually talking about people physically moving to Taiwan, whereas my letter pointed to the transvaluation of individualist principles on the fulcrum of Chinese collectivism.
On Rawson himself, I may yet consider my options...
Saturday, 4 September 2010
2 comments:
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Rawson, in his letter:
ReplyDelete“[I]n certain Western jurisdictions, which have been served very well by the rule of law... [Michael Fagan’s] letter may in certain circumstances have landed both him and the Taipei Times in the dock for incitement of racial hatred.”
Although he (understandably) neglects any attempt to illuminate what was racist in your comments, could he have better granted and illustrated your point about the rule of law devolving into the rule of men than by so approvingly calling forth the specter of legally suppressed speech? He certainly sounds like he’d love to get his hands on a law like that.
Linda,
ReplyDeleteIt's possible that Rawson is simply stupid, but more likely that he is stupid and connected. At any rate, the fact that his accusation of explicit racism is demonstrably false indicates a devious nature.
Regardless of whether he himself consciously wishes for political power or whether he sincerely believes a "rule of law" can be coherently applied to political groups over and above individuals, it is the latter that is the more dangerous and under which he would most likely take cover in any case.
I may act on this in some form or other eventually (I'm tied up with one particularly important excuse for the next couple of months), but I'm not in any hurry to forget about him.