"Organizers said that at least 5,000 people joined the anti-nuclear protest in Taipei City, which was characterized by a carnival-like atmosphere..."
I dropped in on the anti-nuke protest in Kaohsiung City yesterday; my guesstimate for the attendance would be somewhere in the region of two thousand, which, on a saturday in a city of over two million people, is tiny. At the initial rallying point in a park just off Bo-ai road, the MC went through attendance by region - that two thousand included people from Pingtung, Tainan and Chiayi as well as Kaohsiung.
The crowd was a mix of crusty old DPP supporters, some parents with children but mostly young people - students,hippies and party minions. This old man was very insistent about getting me to photo him with his sign. Many of the old folks around were in DPP uniform, but there were plenty of casually dressed ones as well; I wondered whether there may have been any light-blue types among the casually dressed.
The green party (as in environment, not DPP) had quite a few young student types working for them, which is of course, entirely unsurprising. That they all had "Green Party Taiwan" bibs and hats and so on was illustrative of the forethought and planning of the party leadership under
Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲). I should have had some "Green Kills" and "Socialism Kills" T-shirts made up to hand out when I was there. That would have gone down a treat...
There were a few cute teenage girls of course and lots of daft costumes. These fellas were dancing on top of trucks and on the main stage early on at the initial rally, but shed their costumes for the subsequent march around San Min district. What were the tunes they were playing? Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and Underworld's "Born Slippy" due no doubt to the lyrical references to chemicals and addiction.
These two girls were with the green party; they had tied green party ribbons around their little dogs, which you can see if you look closely. I had my dog with me too as it happened, but no way was I going to have green flyers on her. After the drive down from Tainan, I couldn't stay to see the entire opening rally as my own dog was thirsty - I nipped to the 7-11 for some water and copped a few minutes in the park just next to Tongmen road.
Parents took their kids out of school for the day to dress up and drag their signs around town all afteroon. In one of the pictures I took (not this one), one of the boys carrying that sign (second from right) looked straight into my lens with an expression of being fed up and tired. I felt sorry for the little sods, they must have been wishing they were back home or even in school.
This was a funny moment; seeing me taking pictures, these two cute girls decided to get me to sign their placards - they got a smile, but only because they were cute, not because I agree with them: I gave them a wink and pretended to sign it... B.Luck! It's such a shame to see teenagers who should have bright futures to look forward to getting involved with insane environmentalists.
Here is a prime example of what I mean when I say that there are far too many "universities" in Taiwan: the very idea of a "graduate institute for gender studies" is a joke, and the sooner their State funding is cut the better. Shortly after that picture, I decided enough was enough and started to pack up. At the end of the day, I must have taken a couple of hundred snaps at least, as well as quite a few other architecture shots for a friend.
The crowd was a mix of crusty old DPP supporters, some parents with children but mostly young people - students,hippies and party minions. This old man was very insistent about getting me to photo him with his sign. Many of the old folks around were in DPP uniform, but there were plenty of casually dressed ones as well; I wondered whether there may have been any light-blue types among the casually dressed.
The green party (as in environment, not DPP) had quite a few young student types working for them, which is of course, entirely unsurprising. That they all had "Green Party Taiwan" bibs and hats and so on was illustrative of the forethought and planning of the party leadership under Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲). I should have had some "Green Kills" and "Socialism Kills" T-shirts made up to hand out when I was there. That would have gone down a treat...
There were a few cute teenage girls of course and lots of daft costumes. These fellas were dancing on top of trucks and on the main stage early on at the initial rally, but shed their costumes for the subsequent march around San Min district. What were the tunes they were playing? Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and Underworld's "Born Slippy" due no doubt to the lyrical references to chemicals and addiction.
These two girls were with the green party; they had tied green party ribbons around their little dogs, which you can see if you look closely. I had my dog with me too as it happened, but no way was I going to have green flyers on her. After the drive down from Tainan, I couldn't stay to see the entire opening rally as my own dog was thirsty - I nipped to the 7-11 for some water and copped a few minutes in the park just next to Tongmen road.
Parents took their kids out of school for the day to dress up and drag their signs around town all afteroon. In one of the pictures I took (not this one), one of the boys carrying that sign (second from right) looked straight into my lens with an expression of being fed up and tired. I felt sorry for the little sods, they must have been wishing they were back home or even in school.
This was a funny moment; seeing me taking pictures, these two cute girls decided to get me to sign their placards - they got a smile, but only because they were cute, not because I agree with them: I gave them a wink and pretended to sign it... B.Luck! It's such a shame to see teenagers who should have bright futures to look forward to getting involved with insane environmentalists.
Here is a prime example of what I mean when I say that there are far too many "universities" in Taiwan: the very idea of a "graduate institute for gender studies" is a joke, and the sooner their State funding is cut the better. Shortly after that picture, I decided enough was enough and started to pack up. At the end of the day, I must have taken a couple of hundred snaps at least, as well as quite a few other architecture shots for a friend.
Check this out:
ReplyDeleteFirst Mark Steyn:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/266101/three-cups-snake-oil-mark-steyn
Then the article he mentions and comments on:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/mission-creep/?singlepage=true
This reminds me: If my kids go to school rather than being home-schooled, I better be damn sure to go over the reading their teachers are pushing on them.
My favorite part is where he got kids forced not only to read the book, but also to donate to his charity Pennies-for-Peace.
"In the very same year that the Mom’s Choice saps honored the “program”, US schoolchildren donated $1.7 million to Mortenson’s 501(c)3. In return, the 501(c)3 spent $612,000 on its ostensible purpose – Afghan school supplies, teachers’ salaries, etc. The remaining $1.1 million raised by American children went toward the $1.4 million spent flying Mortenson around from one speaking engagement to another on private jets."
ReplyDeleteThat is jaw-droppingly outrageous.
Not really, after Planned Parenthood, Acorn, NJ Teachers' Union party and NPR stings in the US, it's pretty much par for the course. Think Al Gore as an environmental folk hero, Bono's Africa thing, The current mess in Libya, climate change(have you seen the 10-10 video?, Al Sharpton's presidential bid, Jesse Jackson and his shakedown organization, and the current head of the US treasury is an incompetent tax cheat. I think after that list I don't really need to go on though I would like to add EU parliament, just to rub the salt in especially after the per diem scam they were running.
ReplyDeleteCharities actually get audited and rated by private organizations. It's just that this one had such a great left-wing message that US liberals bought into that they failed to do their due diligence. That guy's book was required reading for thousands of schools and classes, and the US military officer corps. We will now spend the next century having to debunk his nonsense over and over again because what people wanted to believe could happen despite it not having happened and nobody bothering to do due diligence. Think Bermuda Triangle, US Civil War was fought to end slavery, Democrats are for civil rights despite having been the party that tried to filibuster the civil rights bill.
Outrageous, Okami, not surprising. I hate to have to pull you up on this sort of thing again, but words mean things and their habitual misuse is not a triviality. Look here's another...
ReplyDelete"...tax cheat..."
To take steps to make sure your money is not stolen from you is not "cheating". In Geithner's case, as a member of the government, it stinks of hypocrisy of course - but that's not the same thing. There are plenty of other things to call Geithner, but that is not one I can endorse, since it implicitly cedes the premise that taxation is justifiable, which, in my view, it is not. Once that point is conceded, you're then in the position of having to defend some forms of State coercion but not others - and in the absence of any clear principle of demarcation, that's a loser.
"..US liberals..."
They're not liberals: to call them that is to corrupt the root of the word and thereby weaken its' connection to the idea it stands for by introducing a fatal contradiction. A person who regards liberty as the prime political value cannot be a person who can vote for a President Obama or a Senator Reid.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but I must ask you to take more care over your use of particular words Okami.
On "US liberals": You're correct, Mike, that "US liberals" are certainly not liberal. Even their social policies smack of top-down, heavy-handed, totalitarian-like engineering of society all at the expense of the individual. Even though I must admit that some of their social ideas are attractive (when considering what the conservatives have to offer in these regards), their using politics and campaigns to force things through Congress remind me far more of Maoist tactics to "cleanse" society of Rightists and counter-revolutionaries.
ReplyDeleteThat said, conservatives in the United States twist the term "liberal" for several reasons, not least important of which is to tar not only the socialists but also the true liberals (who are actually quite few in the United States). Forget the Libertarian Party of the United States. Most "Libertarians" I know have moved on to strains of anarchism or minarchism (I understand Libertarians are minarchists, but believe me when I say the US Libertarian Party is not a minarchist party) simply because they are so fed up with the wishy-washiness of the US Libertarian Party (candidates now running as independents, now running as Republicans). In the United States, one is either a Progressive (puke), a Conservative (puke), or a wacko. There are no in betweens. Oh, how we Westerners (in general) love our dichotomies and dialectics and can stomach (and comprehend) little else. Zoroaster, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx did their work well.
Nathan, at this point electoral politics in the U.S. is a joke. Let's assume that someone like Christie wins the Presidency next year - what's his first problem? Inflation: the banks are sitting on enormous excess reserves, which will likely mean significant inflationary pressure as soon as that money begins to enter the private loan markets. If he instructs the Fed to keep paying them, the national debt keeps growing. Whatever he does on that score, he's on to a loser. What's his second problem? Getting real public spending cuts through congress - that cannot be done without a major effort at legislative repeal or reform of SS, which will be extraordinarily difficult even in a Republican controlled congress - and he'd have to try to ram that through congress in his first two years before the Democrats retake seats in 2014 (mirroring what Obama did).
ReplyDeleteThere has to be a concerted and prolonged effort among the public to campaign for honest money reforms and massive privatization... and even with the Tea Party I just can't see that happening for a long time yet; the roots of the problem are too deep. Yet unless that happens, a Republican President will have insufficient "political capital" to do little other than trim around the edges.
Taiwan might get some gear out of Lockheed and the like, but that won't change the fact that in any potential conflict with the PRC, Taiwan will need U.S. help - help which will be dependent, in part, on domestic calculations. That's why I keep saying that people in Taiwan need to think about ways of protecting themselves through political reforms aimed at weakening the government in Taipei's power structure (debt reduction, currency reforms, public spending cuts, subsidy removals, privatization, devolution, military reform etc...). Depoliticization of Taiwan would significantly raise the various costs of annexation to the PRC, but of course, the necessary reforms are almost certainly unthinkable within the DPP - even for the so-called "new generation".
Still, that's no excuse to not bother making the arguments.
I've grown more and more fond of Orwell's saying about life going on as it has always gone on--that is badly; I don't like the saying, so I shouldn't say I'm "fond of" it, but I do find it quite close to reality. To me, the whole damn thing has to crash at some point. How long can all of this just keep floating? The whole thing just disgusts me.
ReplyDeleteOk, time to throw down Michael Fagan.
ReplyDeleteI and most Americans feel that some taxes should be paid. Govt does some things well that not many of us would be comfortable with a private company doing. So while you may see it as not cheating on taxes from a libertarian-anarchist model, for bread-and-butter conservatives it's cheating. If we had done it, we'd be facing fines, liens and forfeiture of our property. The fact that the media doesn't cover it enrages us. This is your Tea Party element that a lot of people don't get.
About the usage of "liberal"
In America it used to be quite laissez-faire with "legal unless outlawed" the norm versus "illegal unless allowed" like in most of the rest of the world. Most disputes, laws and justice were handled locally, till about the time of the New Deal. This along with the direct elections of senators removed the impediment of the onus of deciding matters at the local rather than the national level. So while decentralization and privatization may seem like a liberal perspective from your eurocentric viewpoint since it's a change from the old ways, from an American viewpoint it's a conservative perspective since that's always the way things have been done. It's a matter of point of reference. Americans don't misuse the term but in fact use the terms correctly because the facts and history give them a different starting viewpoint. Liberals used to be called progressives but had so overreached as to have made that term poison to the general electorate.
Nathan makes the common error of confusing libertarians, libertines, and anarchists. A libertine wants to do whatever they feel they want or can handle with govt interference but has no issue with the govt doing certain services and interfering in others as long as it doesn't bother them. A libertarian seeks to minimize govt influence as much as possible except for an agreed set of rules determined by society. Anarchists are another ideology entirely. The problem is due to lazy educational norms, people don't know the history or correct use of words.
In the US one is not either a conservative or progressive, most people are pretty much center right. They want a social safety net as people are more fearful of what they can lose versus joyful at what they would gain. Tea party members(it's a broad term as the organization is organic and has no leaders) are generally middle class, educated, feel they should pay taxes and live by the rules. The problem is with gotcha journalism, it's very easy to get someone on camera saying something stupid. I can point to a host of those on either side of the political spectrum. Most Americans just want to be left alone without the fear it's all going to come crashing down.
Chris Christie is not going to run for president. Good politician, great at speaking and taking on open mic audiences, but he has empathetically stated he ain't running. The most disturbing thing is the constant chase by journalists to peg a republican politician as a presidential candidate, see Jindal, Rubio. The current field is so dark horse, pathetic or unelectable that it's better to see what comes up next year in the primaries. Trump is in it for the money, fame and ego. Romney is more unelectable than Palin. Pawlenty is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Gingrich has more skeletons in his closet than a Chinese cemetery. None of the stars want to run as they either know they don't want it that bad yet or they don't want to put themselves and their family through that sort of emotional roller-coaster. Then there is the common the republican VP is an idiot (Palin/Quayle) or evil(George H Bush/Cheney) MSM template.
One issue is that the new deal has left such a lasting legacy. Legislation nearly 80 years old has had some of the most profound impacts on our govt and the mess we are in. That's even taking in account how much has been repealed and redone.
ReplyDeleteThe next republican president will be left with some hard choices and require communication skills on par with Ronald Reagan. He will probably have a slim Senate majority and a firm house majority. He will be filibustered in the Senate endlessly and portrayed as a mean cruel and heartless man in the media. The main advantage he has is that the scare tactic of grandma eating cat food and not getting a social security check is not nearly as useful as it was before.
Already at the state and local level we are seeing huge battles with unions getting their benefits pared back, education becoming cheaper and freer to operate and budgets getting balanced. Except for a few holdouts, notably California and Illinois everyone else seems to have a good chance to make it except for New Jersey. Compare this with the huge deficits facing places like Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland which despite EU assurances will do little more than bring down the entire EU and it's various banks with it. In all honesty Portugal, Greece, and Ireland weren't bailed out to help them, but to help the various banks in the UK, Germany and France that held their debt as a portion that needed to be a certain investment grade. You don't hear anyone in the EU talking about cutting back the state, it generally revolves around limiting immigration and cutting out EU expenditures. The conversation hasn't even gotten to be serious yet though the circumstances are.
The problem that most nations have is they generally fail to think outside the box. If I were Taiwan I'd just build cruise missiles and aim them at the 3 Gorges dam, the Shanghai port and the homes of high level communist officials. The problem is most social democratic leadership is just plain ignorant. They think they know a lot about one thing so they think they know a lot about a lot of things when in fact they don't know much about much. Look how unserious the argument over nuclear power is.
"Nathan makes the common error of confusing libertarians, libertines, and anarchists. A libertine wants to do whatever they feel they want or can handle with govt interference but has no issue with the govt doing certain services and interfering in others as long as it doesn't bother them. A libertarian seeks to minimize govt influence as much as possible except for an agreed set of rules determined by society. Anarchists are another ideology entirely. The problem is due to lazy educational norms, people don't know the history or correct use of words."
ReplyDeleteNo, Okami, look again. I said the US Libertarian Party is not libertarian--nay, isn't even liberal in the classical sense at all--and is instead in the hip pocket of the Republican Party. I don't make this gaffe, I said most Americans I know who used to be Libertarians are disenchanted with the party for not being what they say they are. That's not my confusion, nor is it theirs. That's what has happened.
"Ok, time to throw down Michael Fagan."
ReplyDeleteOh behave yourself, you don't even throw your weight around at Turton's place.
Look, I know my way around all the tax arguments, and as I've said before I see little point in arguing the toss over libertarian nirvana. The point was that you can criticise Geithner's tax evasion without validating the language and premises of the Left.
"So while decentralization and privatization may seem like a liberal perspective from your eurocentric viewpoint since it's a change from the old ways, from an American viewpoint it's a conservative perspective since that's always the way things have been done."
Sure, but in the U.S. those two policies would be attempts to conserve... a liberal political order. "Conservatism" isn't an ideology - it's a derivative set of attitudes toward an ideology which in the U.S. was liberal in the Lockean or as you so disparagingly put it, the "eurocentric" sense. And look, this is my blog, and it's a small thing I'm asking - call them commies, or socialists, or democrats or whatever else you want, but the next time you call them "liberals" I'm deleting that comment. Verstanden?
"The problem is due to lazy educational norms, people don't know the history or correct use of words."
Like "irony" for instance...
"Tea party members... are generally middle class, educated, feel they should pay taxes and live by the rules."
Yes, I know.
"Chris Christie... has empathetically stated he ain't running."
Has he? I wasn't aware of that.
"Trump is in it for the money, fame and ego..."
I'm not buying that - he's got plenty of each of those already. I'm not entirely convinced he knows what he's doing, but his talk isn't that bad and I admire his going after the birth certificate issue; that takes guts.
"One issue is that the new deal has left such a lasting legacy.
Agreed - that taken together with some of the prior reforms (e.g. anti-trust legislation and the creation of the Fed), has been enormously consequential.
"Compare this with the huge deficits facing places like Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland which despite EU assurances will do little more than bring down the entire EU and it's various banks with it."
Are you kidding me? U.S. national debt is pushing $14 f*cking trillion, and the monetary base has been increased by more than U.S.$1 trillion alone. The only way in which the U.S. might possibly be better off than the Europeans is work ethic, and the inertia of what earlier generations achieved. And answer me this - which European country banned alcohol during the 1920s?
"In all honesty Portugal, Greece, and Ireland weren't bailed out to help them, but to help the various banks in the UK, Germany and France that held their debt as a portion that needed to be a certain investment grade. You don't hear anyone in the EU talking about cutting back the state, it generally revolves around limiting immigration and cutting out EU expenditures. The conversation hasn't even gotten to be serious yet though the circumstances are."
Yes, agreed on all points. There are people however, who do talk about cutting back spending but they are marginalized by the political system.
"If I were Taiwan I'd just build cruise missiles and aim them at the 3 Gorges dam, the Shanghai port and the homes of high level communist officials."
Apparently the government under Chen had been trying to do exactly that - but secrecy is extremely expensive and difficult. And if you do it openly, you invite pre-emptive strikes before you're even half-way finished.
Nathan... the U.S. Libertarian party is a joke, always has been, always will be and there's nothing they can ever do about that.
You bet, Mike. Just correcting Okami's interpretation of what I wrote (above). Cheers.~
ReplyDelete