The crazy guys from VBS have 14 parts of strange-but-interesting video footage from that open air prison known as North Korea… check it out.
I do not think they are going to be invited back.
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The rioting in Lhasa seems to be continuing and now it has been reported that some discontent is boiling over elsewhere in Chinese occupied Tibet. Of course if the official death toll says:
It is safe to say it is probably ten times that, at least on the side of the resistors. It seems that Chinese colonists have also been involved in attacking Tibetans, so this does appear to be far from over. Sadly I cannot see China having any serious trouble remaining in control given the sheer size of their security apparatus. So, all you activists out there who have made a career out of excoriating Israel, do you have anything to say about this? Update: I received the following e-mail from a person called Lee Ming:
Some Chinese claims assert they have ruled Tibet since the 13th century (the Peace Treaty between Tibet and Britain in 1904 is strangely forgotten): 1. Chinese rule was always debatable 2. The historical claim is largely irrelevant. Scotland has been part of the UK since 1707 and it was in a loose de union with England since 1603… yet if a majority in Scotland vote to become independent now, do you think UKGov will send in the riot cops and troops? No. Hell, if a majority in Wessex want to go their own way, I quite like the idea of that too. There is nothing sacred about nation states. The fact a majority of Tibetans want to be independent of China rather than live under colonial occupation is all the justification needed. March 17th, 2008 | 75 comments - (Comments are closed)
 At first I was going to put this up as a Samizdata quote of the day. It is a paragraph from a piece by Mark Leonard in the latest issue of Prospect, about Chinese think tanks. The Chinese intelligentsia have their left and right, it seems, just like us.
Nice story. But the problem, from the quote-of-the-day point of view, is that Zhang Weiying surely has the story upside down and entirely wrong. They did not start by painting stripes on horses. They introduced real zebras, but painted over the stripes and declared them to be horses just as usual. No change was occurring. No upheaval. It was still socialism. Only after the amazing production gains duly materialised were the authorities in a position to wash away the camouflage, and admit that the new and improved “horses” had been zebras all along. But – extra twist – the zebra stripes are still painted over. They still insist that they are horses. Horse with stripes painted on them are what you introduce when you are trying to get rid of zebras. March 3rd, 2008 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 My life has been fairly busy for the last couple of months, and as a consequence, I have not managed to report on this blog the results of my “Anyone in Singapore want to meet up?” request, from December. This is a shame, because thanks have been order to a Samizdata reader and commenter whose response ensured that things turned out very well. However, better late than never. What happened was that long time Samizdata commenter The Wobbly Guy offered to take me out for crab at Mellben seafood restaurant in Ang Mo Kio, which, as he put it, “is noted for its crab”. Australians such as myself are also fond of crab, but we tend to eat it more simply than the Singaporeans. Australians tend to eat crab boiled with relatively few embelishments. Singaporeans tend to eat it with more spices and chilis. However, when we talk about past visits to one another’s countries, people of both nationalities will tend to say things like “Mmmmmm. Great seafood”. As it happened though, on my last day in Singapore I made something close to a terrible mistake. Wandering along Geylang road at about 2pm I discovered that I was hungry, and I therefore walked into one of many street restaurants in that area that offer an “unlimited Steamboat buffet” for about $S15. (About £5 or US$10). The restaurant was full of local people having long lunches, and in such a restaurant (in which you cook meat, seafood, vegetables, and goodness knows what else in a bowl of boiling soup in the middle of your table) it is possible to have a very long lunch.  When I walked through the door, the very kind lady running the restaurant thoughtfully enquired as to just how spicy I like my soup, got me a large bottle of Tiger beer, gave me one of those “Go for it” expressions and gestured towards the buffet. I got myself a modest selection of seafood and meats, and sat down to cook and eat it. It was good. Repeat until fade. On about my third trip to the buffet, the kind lady saw me tentatively placing a modest portion of crab on my plate, and decided it was time to put me to rights. She gave me one of those “You poor, pathetic westerner. You truly have no idea, do you?” looks, and proceeded to pile my plate high with crab for me. Chastened by this, I took the seafood back to my table and my soup, and got myself another bottle of beer. I was slowly getting there, but the guys at the next table clearly were not having any such problems.  Thus, after intending to have a quick lunch, I stumbled back out onto the street two and a half hours later after engorging vast amounts of food. So thus, when The Wobbly Guy very kindly picked me up from my hotel after I had rushed off to the centre of town topick up the custom suits I had ordered a couple of days earlier, I was perhaps not ideally prepared. It wasn’t quite as bad as attempting a six star day in Donostia, but it was perhaps heading that way. Somewhat to my relief I had a further opportunity to digest my lunch before moving onto dinner, as the combination of a public holiday and a very popular restaurant meant that we had to queue. Several restaurants nearby lacked such queues – presumably they cater to the “people who are willing to eat less good food but are in a hurry” crowd. In addition, this gave us a chance both to chat and to watch another of these kind but formidable Singaporean restaurant women removing the alive and active crabs from the large styrofoam boxes marked “Singapore Airlines” in which the crabs had apparently just been flown in from Sri Lanka.  As she did this, she watched by some cute as a button children, some of who were probably determined to grow up to be kind but formidable Singaporean restaurant women themselves.  As we waited, The Wobbly Guy and I were able to compare our national culinary cultures. I am still not sure if either the “sand crabs” and “mud crabs” we get in Australia are the same species to those eaten in Singapore. Clearly more research is in order. → Continue reading: A belated but sincere thank you February 12th, 2008 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a very interesting story in parts of the media today. Large parts of the Middle East and (in particular) India are suffering a major internet outage. It seems that a storm in Alexandria in Egypt has led to ships going off course and their anchors damaging the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG fiber optic cables connecting India with Europe and Asia, and capacity to India has thus been reduced. There are some older, lower capacity cables still in use, and there are cables to the US also, but these were the main connections to India. It seems at this point unclear whether the two cables were both ruptures near Alexandria, or whether one of the outages was off Marseilles. But in any event, two of the world’s key cables were damaged within a few hours. This seems quite remarkable. The TWO main cables between Europe and India were both damaged within a matter of hours. It seems an extraordinary coincidence. It may or may not be an extraordinary coincidence, and we will find out. However, as a science fiction fan and a reader of Wired Magazine, the mention of these two cables brings back a thought of one of the finest articles ever published in the magazine. In 1996, science fiction author Neal Stephenson (of Snow Crash fame) wrote a long and wonderful essay for Wired Magazine entitled “Mother Earth, Motherboard”. This article was written as the 1990s telecoms boom was gearing up to great heights of enthusiasm, and in a period in which global telecoms at least appeared to be gaining new levels of competition. Stephenson wrote about travelling to a large number of locations around the world, watching the laying of an undersea fibre optic cable named FLAG (Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe), or more specifically the section of it connecting Europe and Asia. He discussed the technologies, and the politics, and the history of communications and other related matters that went with it, and the history of the places he saw along the way. In return for paying what must have been a very considerable expense claim, Wired Magazine got a spectacular piece of writing, but Stephenson clearly got more than they did, as many of the locations that were researched for this essay popped up again in considerable detail in his novel Cryptonomicon, and to a lesser extent in his Baroque Trilogy that followed. Many of them cropped up in sections of those novels set in various eras in the past, particularly in the second world war. The list of places that Stephenson visited during the laying of FLAG has a very trading empire quality about it, and mostly a British trading empire quality about it: Alexandria, Port Said, Bombay, Penang, Hong Kong, Shanghai, places that contain, as Stephenson puts it, “British imperial-era hotels fraught with romance and history, sort of like the entire J. Peterman catalogue rolled into one building”. The reason for the confluence with the British Empire makes perfect sense when you think about it: the strongest parts of the British Empire were outposts to defend Britain’s control of trade routes, and so they are at key points on those trade routes. If you are laying an undersea cable, then you want to lay it along the shortest route that it can safely be placed. What is required is a mixture of minimum distance and political stability. The minimum distances for cables today are the same as the minimum distances for ships in the nineteenth century (and generally for ships today, also). Between Europe and Asia, there are two key bottlenecks through which you must travel, as the alternatives are either much longer or much less politically stable. Those two bottlenecks are of course through Egypt between the Mediterranean and the red sea, and through the Straits of Malacca between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Hence Alexandria and Penang. Of course, these places have been strategic since long before the British Empire, which is why a lighthouse and a library were built in Alexandria, but the British Empire is recent enough for its mood to linger. → Continue reading: Some thoughts on India’s internet outage February 1st, 2008 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a truly bizarre story on Reuters saying that the French car manufacturer Citroën has apologised for running an advertisement featuring a scowling Chairman Mao.
Astounding. The man who was probably the most prolific mass murderer in history, who murdered between 44.5 & 72 million mostly Chinese people and brought tyranny to almost one fifth of the world’s population, is regarded by some people in 2008 as “the symbol of China”? That is truly surreal. Well, I suppose he is in the same sense that Jack the Ripper is the ‘symbol’ of Whitechapel. Yet somehow I cannot see the residents of Whitechapel taking umbrage at an advertisement by Citroen featuring Jack the Ripper being portrayed with a less than congenial expression. Just how many people does a tyrant have to order killed before he becomes absolute anathema in China? How many lives does he have to ruin to stop being ‘the symbol of China’? What kind of moral derangement is required to take insult in this manner? Well people in China should indeed be insulted, but by the fact Citroën used the image of that vile psychopath to portray anything other than horror, death and misery. How dare someone trivialise suffering on such a colossal scale? How would people react if they had used Hitler instead? People would certainly protest but somehow I do not think all too many Germans would be saying “The Fuhrer is the symbol of Germany”. A Chinese person I know described the Mao era as ‘The Long Nightmare’. It seems some people in China do not want to wake up. January 15th, 2008 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Part of the problem with modern democratic states is they have far too much time to figure out new ways to regulate and control every aspect of life. They do this in order to pander to the sectional obsessions of this or that element of the electorate, and to satisfy the pathological control freak mindset that defines most people who are attracted into politics. Japan however find much less damaging and far more interesting ways to spend legislative time.
Oh how I wish the UK Parliament and US Congress would spend less time on implementing laws to abridge our liberties and more on how to prevent 170 foot tall radioactive fire breathing saurians from stomping on our cities and destroying our skolzandhospitalz. Obviously the whole absurd ‘Islamic terrorists’ shtick was just a ruse to hide the terrible truth of what really happened on 9/11. After all, as so many people keep endlessly reminding us, Islam is a religion of peace, so huge Japanese monsters (no doubt under the influence of Haliburton mind control rays) are a far more plausible explanation if you think about it. Clearly this is something that should occupy legislative time from the moment our fine representatives go into session until the moment they go home at night. For pity’s sake, honourable members, do it for the children. December 23rd, 2007 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
With a little help from her friends, Japan has sent a loud and clear message to North Korea.
The SM-3 is certainly a good enough interceptor to handle the appropriately named North Korean ‘Nodong’ ICBM. I say that because they seem to be as likely to fail as to get where they are going. December 18th, 2007 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Gary Rosen has been out in China, burning his boats, the ones that might ever take him back to China in the foreseeable future. Good for him. My thanks to the ever useful Arts & Letters Daily for the link. I particularly liked the bit about how the Chinese regime censors the awkward stuff, and I offer no apology for quoting it at some length:
Which is about as excellent an exposition of the imperfect correspondence between the ideals of democracy and of liberty as you could ever hope to encounter, don’t you think? Rosen continues:
You seldom read reportage like that from China, or from any other efficiently administered despotism with a definite future, do you? And the reportage itself explains why. The exception that explains the rule, you might say. November 29th, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
You know the feeling. A market rises like a rocket; there is lots of gushing news items about how market X or Y is the hottest thing since the iPod; but there is a lot of muttering about the inevitable fall, the decline, or even the monster crackup. Well, it has sort of happened with the US credit market this year and the collapse of sub-prime mortgages (in plain English, the business of lending money to people who are often bad repayers). I have this sort of queasy feeling now about China. Do not get me wrong: I am delighted that China is a poster child for how things improve if you ditch certain aspects of collectivism, but it is still a long, long way from what a free society could or should be. And some of the economic data that comes out of that vast country gives economists cause for concern. October 29th, 2007 | 88 comments - (Comments are closed)
Burma is a good example of ‘gun control’, i.e. a state of affairs where firearms are a legal monopoly of the government forces. One side has good intentions and the other side has loaded rifles, and the result (so far) has been the same as it was in 1988 – or even back in 1962 when the late General Ne Win first set up his socialist administration. However, me being a cold hearted man whose mind starts to wander even when shown scenes of murder and other horror, the situation reminds me of the philosophy of David Hume. This mid 18th century Scottish philosopher claimed that government was not based on force – but rather that it was based on opinion. Hume did this to mock the claim that there was a great difference between the ‘constitutional’ government of Britain and the ‘tyranny’ of France – under the skin both sides are basically the same, was his point. This was part of David Hume’s love of attacking what his opponents (such as Thomas Reid) were to call “Common Sense”. David Hume was involved in what are now called ‘counter intuitive’ positions. Hume claimed (at times) that there was no objective reality – that the physical universe was just sense impressions in the mind. This did not stop him also claiming (at times) that the mind did not exist, in the sense of a thinking being, that a thought did not mean a thinker – that there was no agent and thus no free willed being. Whether David Hume actually believed any of this – or whether he was just saying to people “you do not have any strong arguments for your most basic beliefs – see how weak reason is”… is not the point here. The point is that many people. including many people who have never heard his name, have been influenced by the ideas of David Hume. For example, Louis XVI of France did not actively resist his enemies, going so far as ordering others, such as the Swiss Guard, not to resist, because he had read David Hume’s History of England – it was his favourite book. In his history Hume claimed that Charles the First did not get killed because he lost the Civil War (as a simple minded ordinary man might think) – but because he had fought back against his enemies at all. If he had not resisted his enemies, they would have seen no need to kill him (a clever counter intuitive position). So Louis XVI did not resist. It is possible that he was given cause to doubt Hume’s wisdom right before his enemies murdered him, and so many others, but we will never know the answer to that I suppose. In Burma, as in so many other places, many people seem to have thought that opinion, namely the good intentions of the majority, were more important than firepower – they appear to be mistaken. “You are showing lack of respect for the dead” – perhaps, but I am warning people not to stand against men with rifles when you are unarmed. Get the firepower, one way or another, and learn how to use it, then you may have a chance at liberty – you can not have it, or keep it, without firepower. And that remains true even if you win some soldiers over to your side with appeals to their reason. September 29th, 2007 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Maybe I should point out this story to my lovely Japanese sister-in-law. I wonder how many ordinary British people, never mind women, do things like this to make money? August 3rd, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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