"Politicists"

That is now my preferred term for all of them. H/T: Midwesterner.

Fall

I had been planning to go to Kenting this weekend (brilliant weather), but instead I've been stuck at home with an irritating skin rash and some ointment. Although I haven't written much on here the past two months (constant rage is exhausting and unhealthy), I have done a lot of exercise at the beach and the park. The air around this time of year carries a lot of fungal spores to which sweaty skin is an ideal thriving ground. Either that or it was an allergic reaction to the Taiwanese election wankfest over the last couple of weeks...

I imagine I'll be back with things to say after a few weeks.

Listening > Hearing

A simple well formed question can no longer be delivered to even an apparently well formed engineering ear without echoes of incomprehension. After some irrelevant stammering on efficiency levels and why storage is not really the problem, I eventually get my own question innocently and incomprehendingly handed back to me as a straight answer.

The Question: isn't the problem with lithium batteries for solar cells that they are too large and expensive?

I can't remember the last conversation I had which wasn't a mere endurance of someone else's echoing solipsism.

Song Jia-lun

"I am telling this city: Democracy should not be in tune with capitalism. So I oppose temporary employment, and exploitation, I support the legalization of sex work, and I support the homeless because we could all become homeless."

Presented as "the difference between Taiwan and China" by Turton and without even the slightest hint of criticism. Ask yourself why.

Ben Goren Again

"Your presumptions outweigh what you actually know, Ben; on humour and more."

The hint was in the spelling, but I didn't expect the intelligence from him to pick up on it. After all, does it not speak volumes about him that he believes his readers need a diagram to illustrate the concept of feedback? I could also add that, contrary to Ben's protestations that he'd rather spend his time on conversation, he never once replied to the sincere effort I made for him here. I would suppose this is because he has an intellectual honesty appropriate to the dignified circus-sound of his name.

The Clauswitz Inversion

"Politics in a democracy consists of two armies showing up on the same battlefield, counting each other, and then the smaller army surrendering and going home for two years without actually bothering to fight the battle first. The difference between “politics” and “full-blast civil war” has never been more or less than that third step, wherein the presumptive losers preemptively surrender. Drop that last step from the agenda, and you’ve got war."

Commenter "Matt" at John Venlet's place gives a superb rendering of the Clauswitz inversion.

Crazy Week

What a week I'm having. On Tuesday I tried to stop a rather large guard dog from killing a stray at the park - the owner was simply not competent to control it and I nearly got into a fight with what I assume was her son. Yesterday I twisted my back driving back to Tainan from Kaohsiung. This morning I had to make an emergency stop at an intersection to avoid hitting a stupid little man running a busy red light, and tonight I had a whole gang of young men wanting to jump me because I'd had the nerve to shout at one of them for tailgating me and beeping his horn. I'm confident I'd win a fight with any one of them - I'm fit, strong, and most importantly, in the right - but ten or more at the same time is a risk I'm not prepared to take on my own without some form of backup.

Anyway, so far I remain unscathed - what will tomorrow bring?

The Retarded Left

Assuming a passing acquaintance with economics and monetary policy, no further comment is necessary on the absurdity of this. Hilarious.

Freedom > Democracy : Democracy < Freedom

Part of my comment at David Reid's blog:

The popular association of democracy with freedom is undeserved since it owes nothing to necessity and everything to comparisons with more crudely arbitrary and tyrannical forms of political organization (e.g. the PRC). A certain degree of freedom may be a necessary constituent of democracy, but democratic government is not a necessary constituent of freedom.

Democratic government, like all government, is logically parasitic upon the market basis of a free society.

Reactions To 2010 U.S. Midterm Elections

Victor Davis Hanson casts a withering glance over President Obama's remaining two years in office:

"I don’t think the American people... who have now given him the greatest midterm putdown in over a half-century... suddenly will pay much attention to his calls for an end to the old divisiveness."

Michael Barone at National Review:

"The policies of the Obama Democrats are not the kind of change Americans hoped for."

Thomas L. Knapp at the 2012 X-voter project points out just one of the contradictions of the U.S. democratic system of "representation":

"71% of Americans either chose not to vote or were forbidden to vote — yet for the next two years the members of the 112th Congress will claim to “represent” us and to possess legitimate authority to rule us."

Meanwhile...

"California is going to go down the toilet... ditto New York State and... Barack's Illinois. Meanwhile the Federal Reserve's latest money bubble will fail... and Federal government entitlement program spending will continue to run out of control. And the unions will go bankrupt. And the MSM will continue to collapse. And General Motors will be exposed as a vast fraud... the United States economy is going to go down the plughole - and FOR ONCE the statists are going to get the blame. The unions are in no position to save them - and neither are the media."

... Paul Marks charts out the likely course of destruction between these midterm elections and the presidential election in 2012. And finally, William Lowther in the Taipei Times:

"As the campaign for the US midterm elections comes to a close, the results are likely to benefit Taiwan, as most polls predict there will be significant Republican gains as voters cast their ballots on Tuesday."

I've said it before, but it bears repeating it - advocates of Taiwanese independence will always find more friends on the right of U.S. politics than on the left, where people like Turton come from.

Metamorphosis

"His PhD thesis at Oxford University was on the ectoparasites of birds, "so I started with very small organisms and then worked up to global environmental problems."

And in so doing Walther has left the mere study of parasites to actually become one; he is a politician now, and that means something Turton is in no position to impart.

Body & Soul

"He walked out into the street and was arrested. He had put his actions behind his words. He had written five books and given numerous lectures. He stammered and then kept on talking up a storm; he took sides all right; his combative style would let the objects of his critique feel that he lacked calm and objectivity. His disregard for “face,” his cutting and uncompromising remarks, made people uncomfortable. He didn’t care at all what people said about him."

Bei Ling describes Liu Xiaobo in memory of his return to Beijing in 1989 and his recent incarceration by the PRC.

Disqualifier

"Harvard University needs to think about revoking President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) law degree."

Don Cropper may need Harvard to do that for his own purposes, but I don't. Given the problems of economic oversupply of University education, widespread grade inflation, student debt and decades-long Marxist infestation of the humanities, degrees in an increasing number of subjects (even in engineering these days) have become a liability if not an outright disqualifying factor in considerations of competence - i.e. what it takes to produce what other people value. By that standard of course, politicians don't count from the start since the only things they actually produce themselves are lies and fears of reprisal - though I'm sure there's plenty of "consumer demand" for that sort of thing in some quarters.