Sho Fukamachi Online

With the recent trouble in Tibet, I was reminded of this excellent 1999 article from The Atlantic, which influenced me greatly on the issue, prompted me to research such matters independently rather than relying on oversimplified and biased accounts from activists and/or governments, and provided yet another good lesson on how things are never as simple as they might seem.

On the subject of the youtube ban - with so many people so utterly ignorant of the Tibet situation, yet happy to protest anyway (FREE TIBET!) - who can blame the Chinese government for wanting to restrict media they believe will further inflame misinformed tension? Personally, I believe in near-total free speech - I don’t know anyone more hardcore about it, in fact. But it’s pretty easy to see the other side of the coin, too - I have never met a “FREE TIBET” type who knew even the most basic facts about the situation, but that’s never stopped them.

The debate between an assumption of a rational, informed, curious and self-educating population (who should be granted access to all speech, of all type, always) and an ignorant, uninformed, incurious population who believe whatever crap they hear (for whom a rational case can certainly be made to censor unhelpful or misleading information) is far from black and white. I have my beliefs, axiomatic to my broader political opinion, and I won’t back down from them - but I can easily understand how others reach different conclusions about the informational trustworthiness of the public.

Man, I love Australian politics. I don’t know any other parliament in the world where the opposition would do something like this:

That’s a life-size cardboard cut-out of the current PM of Australia. Lol.

(I got sick of typing this halfway through so just posted what I’d done - if half-baked crap annoys you like it does me, skip it!)

The farcical battle between two equally despicable sides in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary is getting more interesting, with the japanese hunter ship Yushin Maru taking into “custody” two Sea Shepard members who boarded their ship illegally to deliver a “letter of condemnation”.

The fact that one of the detainees is Australian is interesting, as it forces open a line of communication between the Australian and Japanese governments - Australia demanded his release last night, and the Japanese govt apparently agreed, although it’s yet to occur. This is interesting because the new AU govt, headed by Kevin Rudd, had made all sorts of anti-whaling promises during its election campaign, only to now determinedly sit on its hands and avoid a diplomatic incident with Japan, a very important trading partner and partner in two critical recent agreements - a Free Trade agreement and, more recently, a formal security alliance. The Rudd government is understandably pretty eager to not start its term in office by inciting a huge diplomatic spat over a thousand whales, which even manic hyper-environmentalist Tim Flannery called a sustainable level of fishing.

Both sides in this high-seas drama are equally dislikable. Firstly, the Japanese whalers, who dogmatically insist on their “traditional” right to catch and eat whales, despite the fact that consumers in Japan won’t eat it - they have over 4,000 tons of whale meat in cold storage in Tokyo which will most likely never be sold. I have personally never met a Japanese person who likes, or even approves of, whale meat. They exacerbate the already hostile situation by insisting the whaling is for “research” - an obvious, blatant lie which just pisses everyone off.

But these Sea Shepard guys are just as bad. Like any cult, its members found themselves lacking purpose or meaning in their lives and happen to have arbitrarily picked “Saving the Whales” as their big mission. They picked whales but it could have been anything - you can see the same obsessed “I am trying to distract myself from my meaningless life by dedicating myself to a ridiculous degree to a basically arbitrary cause” in many situations. They’re the kind of eager-to-join-an-army guys who probably should have just joined the actual army, which thrives on such personality types.

As much as I hate the whalers, I think I like them more than Sea Shepard. At least the whalers just remind me of stubborn old guys who are going to act out their tradition no matter what. And I can imagine the international pressure to stop just makes them more determined to not give in. Japan’s lost a lot of pride since WWII, it’s easy to imagine the mindset of not wanting to give up any more, no matter how misguided. But the Sea Shepard types, young men looking for something, desperate to prove themselves even if they have to die to do it, is far more scary. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’s the same basic driving force behind a lot of heartache in the world. People willing to sacrifice themselves to prove some arbitrary moral point? Reminds me of someone who’d bomb an abortion clinic, or murder a homosexual, or maybe blow themselves up in Iraq.

Check out this quote from their ship’s captain, Paul Watson:

“The Nisshin Maru is the cetacean death star and the most evil ship sailing the high seas today,” he wrote in a weblog. “It must be destroyed if the whales are to live.”

“At the risk of sounding dramatic, my crew and I are prepared to die for these whales if need be,” he said.

Anyway, two of them are hostage and staying in what sounds like hotel-like conditions:

“They are treated very, very humanely and they are provided with a warm, delicious hot meal,” Mr Moronuki said.

“They have [a] warm, nice bath and they are provided [with a] nice bed with clean white sheets so they are in very good condition.”

http://www.smh.com.au/specials/whalewatch/index.html

More videos, this time from the 24th Chaos Communication Congress, or 24C3, conference in Berlin, Germany. Mirrors are going up and down but this one seems to be pretty reliable and fast.

There’s a single presentation about Ruby on Rails security but it’s an anomaly; most talks are about generalised hacking, security, privacy, the politics of all the above, and “hacker politics” in general. By “hacker politics” I simply mean the generalised politics of the techno-elite crowd - privacy, freedom of speech, computer and data rights, and survivalism.

There’s some good stuff there. Though I haven’t made my way through much of it yet, some initial recommendation are What is Terrorism and What Can We Do to Counter The Spies - both harrowing tales of government going badly wrong, guaranteed to inspire you to encrypt everything on, in and out of your computer, use only anonymous prepaid cell phones, burn your garbage, never ever use your real name online or over any radio transmission, and never post anything important to an untrusted web server using an ISP account in your name.

I’ll post further recommendations as I work my way through.

In this new Gallup poll, it’s revealed that 66% of Americans asserted that Creationism, the Christian fairytale that an unseen, unknowable “God” whisked down from “Heaven” and created man in his present form by magic, is either probably or definitely true.

In other words, 66% of Americans are stupid. Really, really stupid.

You know, there’s a lot of questions upon which it’s possible for reasonable people to differ. Climate change is one: I am not personally convinced that human CO2 emissions are responsible for any change in the weather, and not even convinced that a change is necessarily bad, but I know intelligent people who are, and I respect that. I think they’re wrong, but I respect the breadth and depth of their well-reasoned opinion. Abortion’s another one - whether it is allowable or not. I know intelligent people with differing beliefs on that one. The war in Iraq - I supported it, and still do, mostly, despite how badly it’s been run. But I know people with very good reasons why it was, and remains, a very bad idea, with well-thought-out arguments worth listening to.

But not creationism. There’s nothing to debate. On one hand is a logical, reasonable, well-established scientific theory with a great deal of evidence behind it. On the other hand is a few lines in an old religious text asserting that the creation of all species on earth was done by an old man using magic. One of these things is not like the other.

It boggles my mind that anyone could possibly be credulous enough to take on such frivolous, unsupportable myths as unshakeable beliefs. How can they ignore the evidence? There must be fossils predating the supposed “genesis” of earth in every single museum in the world. How can they explain away to themselves the 1800s example of the peppered moth? When the pollution got bad, God came down and changed the moth to a darker colour, and when it got better He came down and changed it back?!

For some time, the question of whether you believe in creationism or not has been a kind of personal litmus test for me - if you believe in it, you’re stupid and your opinions are not worth considering, simple as that. It’s disturbing to discover that two-thirds of the population of the most powerful country on earth fail that simple test.

Unbelievable. What else is there to say?

UPDATE: I shouldn’t have used the word “morons” in the title - many religious people are quite intelligent, more than I perhaps, and may hold their beliefs for complex reasons I don’t know and don’t understand. My apologies for anyone offended by that; I won’t change it though, as it’s my policy to not water down anything I say, I hate people who go back and change their writing to make it more palatable.

However, I have no apologies for my general feeling for religious people. I maintain that a person must have basic flaws in their logical processes to be susceptible to superstition, and religion is the prime example. To believe in something so big, so magical, so impossible, and so completely without evidence is a kind of madness, and the world would be a lot better off without such weak-minded “people of faith”, whatever their superstition of choice.

US taxpayers have debt and unfunded future liabilities totalling a mind-boggling $59 trillion dollars, almost equal to the annual GDP of the entire planet ($61.3 trillion, according to the IMF).

That’s .. a lot of money.

Because I prefer to see these things in video… here’s the realplayer link.

Cool.

America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you.

The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.

Like most lefty sentiment, this specimen is long on complaint and short on solutions. Doesn’t make it untrue, though. Capitalism, like democracy, is the absolute worst way to run a society - except for everything else.

I don’t know why the media isn’t reporting on this incredible news, but on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, China has announced it will allow elections for local politicians. Sure, they’ll all be members of the Communist Party. But there will be scope for differences between them on local issues and surely larger trends will emerge.

So in one stroke, Communist China is now at least a partial democracy. The more cynical amongst us might comment that there is such precious little difference between, say, Australia’s Left and Right politicians that we’re now pretty much equal. Well, no - this is still just for local politics, the equivalent of City Councils, although they have far more power than in the US or AU. But nonetheless, this is an incredible development.

I see nothing on CNN, BBC, or the SMH about this, and I don’t know why. (Highly reliable) blog source here.

For reasons currently known only to myself, my task over the last days and weeks has been to infiltrate, imitate and ingratiate myself amongst several top-ranked left-wing websites.

It’s actually been really fun. I usually hate the right-wing websites - at least the comments sections - because I get personally offended that my political leanings are often shared by such fucking morons as those who comment on every right-wing site I know. But with the left-wing sites, it’s kind of a game to see who can shriek the loudest and most ludicrous denunciation of Bush’s thousand-year reign of torment, and so I often find myself laughing out loud as I compose some insane rant against some total straw man (long time visitors will know I’m pretty good at that) - only to watch it be voted up and hailed by my fellow travellers.

Good times and if my ploy is a success, I’ll be spilling beans galore so stay tuned!

With this recently proposed law from the Bush Administration, I realised a wonderful new balance had been attained within my heart of hearts. That’s right - I think I now hate Republicans and Democrats pretty much equally! Let’s take a brief look at the two parties’ policies:

DEMOCRATS:

“We’re going to fuck everything up, take all your rights and money, and install you in a politically correct welfare nanny state under Sharia Law”.

REPUBLICANS:

“We’re going to fuck everything up, take all your rights and money, and install you in a nightmarish totalitarian police state under Martial Law”.

Seriously, this is fucked. Why not just go all the way and cancel the whole constitution? After all, all those “rights” just make the jobs of terrorists and child pornographers easier. What’s that? You don’t agree with giving up all your rights in the fight against terrorist child porn? WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO HIDE?

Sigh. Another horrible bombing in Iraq, by fanatical savages attempting - and not without some success - to foment civil war. This time, it’s crazy Sunni extremists inciting crazy Shiite extremists. Or is it the other way round? Does it matter?

I have always supported the Iraqi war on three main principles:

1. We should do what we can to free people from oppression
2. We should act quickly to plant seeds of democracy in the Middle East before the situation degenerates into World War
3. We should get Iraqi oil on the market in order to end the Saudi near-monopoly

So, 1 “nice guys” reason and 2 “geopolitical necessity” reasons.

But it seems things are just getting worse. Although there is plenty of progress in many areas, I can’t help but observe that the situation is being fundamentally undermined by the very people who should be grasping the hand trying to pull them up. And although only a small proportion of the Iraqi people as a whole are extremists willing to commit violence to further their apocaplyptic ends - why the hell can’t the rest of them at least try to help stop them?

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Communist china locks up dissenters, as did its former brethren in the USSR. The Islamic dictatorships in Iran and Syria do it every day. Nazi Germany did it. Saddam Hussein did it. The Monarchs of medieval kingdoms did it. We like to distance ourselves from those repressive countries, and cherish our right to dissent as one of the hallmarks of our superior, more civilised and democratic culture.

And yet yesterday David Irving was jailed in Austria for 3 years for Holocaust Denial. This is a travesty and belies everything we claim to stand for as a civilisation.

Now, I can’t stand Irving. He’s a sloppy, rabble-rousing pseudo-historian, glosses over any evidence that doesn’t suit his preordained conclusions, he’s compromised in personal politics and he’s an anti-semite. I’ve read one of his books, and am not interested in reading any more.

But it should not be a crime to question history. It should never be a crime, no matter how many people it upsets or offends. If what is recorded or accepted to have happened really did, we should be able to win any debate on the merits. These people should be shouted down from a position of academic rigour, clear-eyed analysis and moral high ground.

But no! We locked him up. And by “we”, I mean the entire western civilisation, which is more or less homogenous across all the modern European and post-British states. And I am truly ashamed by this.

In the aftermath of the Mohammed cartoons, who are we to speak out for free speech? In fact, I think we can make a very good case for roughly equating the two. Both Holocaust Denial (ie, questioning history) and publishing cartoons of Islam’s Prophet are actions of speech, actions which obviously upset and offend huge numbers of people, could be said to inflame inadvisable passions, and appeal to the basest elements of dangerous sections of society. By denying the Holocaust, we give ammunition to neo-nazis and anti-semites, by depicting the Prophet we hand ammunition to the radicals ever-keen to whip up anti-western sentiments in their delapidated hovels.

But we sanctimoniously publish the cartoons - or, worse, refrain from doing so but for all the wrong reasons - and yet we imprison the deniers. We publicly scoff in the face of one taboo, and then quietly embrace another. It’s hypocritical, it’s unconscionable, it is a crack in the foundations of our free society and we will all be worse off for it.

It has been with intense interest I’ve been following the “Danish Cartoons” story - perhaps more properly titled the “Freedom of Expression vs. Fundamentalist Muslims” story.

Everyone knows the details so I won’t recap. But I will say that today, for the very first time, I read an entire thread at Democratic Underground - an infamous nest of crazy lefties - and did not see ONE comment defending the islamists’ behaviour. That’s unheard of for that site, which is always the first to run to the defence of whatever sick beheading is latest. It seems this latest controversy - a black-and-white confrontation between freedom of speech and fundamentalist religion dogma - is a bridge too far even for the furthest of the far left. To say I’m happy would be an understatement. I’m delighted that the true face of the fundammentalists is being exposed at long last:

‘We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible,’ one preacher told worshippers at the al-Omari Mosque in the Gaza Strip as tensions spread over the publication of the cartoons, first in Denmark and later in Norway, France, Germany and Spain. …

‘We must tell Europeans, we can live without you. But you cannot live without us,’ prominent Muslim cleric Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi told worshippers in Qatar. ‘We can buy from China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia… we will not be humiliated.’

In Lebanon, thousands of Palestinian refugees marched through the streets of their camps, burning Danish and Norwegian flags and calling on Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, to avenge the Prophet Mohammad.

‘We will not be satisfied with protests. The solution is the slaughter of those who harmed Islam and the Prophet,’ said Sheikh Abu Sharif, spokesman for the militant Osbet al-Ansar group, at a rally in Lebanon’s largest camp, the southern Ein al-Hilweh.

We’ll see who’s slaughtered, if it comes to that, Abu.

The Islamists are talking as if this is the beginning of some kind of war, a grand clash of civilisations. I don’t know what other people think but this kind of talk is utterly hilarious to me. In a straight fight, they have no chance at all. Easy to swagger around Gaza with an AK-47 or place roadside bombs in Baghdad. Rather harder to resist a full mechanised assault, or - much less risky for us - a neutron bomb.

And where are the so-called moderates in the “Religion of Peace” now? The silence is deafening. As is the silence of the left, so eager to defend the “free expression” the likes of Piss Christ, usually so accommodating of the Islamist’s insanity, now lost for words and too embarrassed to show their faces.

I just can’t wait until the suicidal Islamist nutcases find this page. That kind of humor would have been unthinkable even a few weeks ago. Could the floodgates be opening at last? The taboo broken? Interesting times ahead.

“Danish Ambassador - Kill the Danish beast”

You know what I hate? I hate people who criticise, but have no plan to make whatever they are criticising better or fix the problem they are complaining about.

Take feminists. They love to complain about the “patriarchy”. They’ll go on and on all day if you let them. But ask them how they could possibly change society in a workable way to fix their grievances, and you draw nothing but blanks. “I don’t claim to have all the answers” they say. Well, in that case, shut up until you have at least some constructive solutions! Women who don’t like the patriarchy have plenty of options. Don’t like male-dominated companies? So start a women-only one! Don’t like men in society? So start a women-only village! Nothing stopping you! Oh, but then they’ll say the reason they can’t do these things is that they’re “oppressed”. Yeah, right. Every male I know works full time from dawn til dusk while half the female population is at home watching Oprah. Don’t tell me about who got a raw deal out of the separation of roles. There’s a reason they don’t show football during business hours on weekdays. Ain’t no men watching “The Bold and the Beautiful”.

And then there’s Iraq. Oh, America has made a huge mistake. Oh, they should never have invaded. So how would YOU have gotten rid of the tyrranical regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, lefties? Why can’t they write a point by point plan of what they would have done to fix the problem? I know why- they don’t know. But they do know that they don’t like it, and now they’re gonna COMPLAIN!!!!

It just goes on and on. Endless moaning without a single contructive suggestion. Without a single alternative plan. I’ve got a million questions for lefties - ANY lefties - that I just can’t get straight answers to. It leads me to conclude they just don’t know, they HAVE no plan. What can I do? I know there are intelligent people on the left. Millions of them. What the fuck do they think? How can I find out? Every single leftie blog I have ever read is just a mind-numbing stream of sarcastic comments about Bush mispronouncing words. WHERE IS THE PLAN, LEFTIES? Enquiring minds really, actually do want to know.

From an Encarta article:

In Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991, every communist government surrendered its monopoly on political power. Communist parties underwent decisive changes as their regimes gave way to multiparty governments. Bowing to new political realities, most Eastern European communist parties sought to mask their origins by changing their names. Communist was replaced by terms such as socialist, social democracy, democratic socialism, and the democratic left. For example, the Bulgarian Communist Party restructured itself as the Bulgarian Socialist Party.

Ah .. communism is only a name-change away!

(Found whilst trying to find a suitably damning definition of neo-communism)

From Mark Steyn:

“China [..] borders Russia — for 2,264 miles with a blip for Mongolia in the middle. Think of America’s frontier problem with Mexico multiplied a hundredfold and you’ll get a sense of Moscow’s dilemma as 2020 approaches. It signed a temporary agreement with Beijing because it simply can’t afford to enforce that border. In the ever-emptier Russian east there are 16 million people and falling. In China, there are one-and-a-half billion and they need lebensraum. China is resource-poor; the Russian east contains 80 percent of that country’s resources. Russia is a dying country — literally: more abortions than live births, lower male life expectancy than Bangladesh. Facing extinction, Moscow doesn’t have much to barter with — except dangling the Chinese an offer that could solve several of their structural problems. “

My sentiments exactly. East Russia simply doesn’t have any reason to remain Russian - and certainly lacks the means to defend itself, beyond an antiquated nuclear deterrent which is probably too old to work now anyway. So it’s not really a question of if, but when, and under what circumstances.

Of course, it’s nothing but idle speculation on my behalf… but since that has never stopped me before, I’d say China would take possession of the land in a meandering vertical line somewhere between the 100th and 120th meridians - namely above Mongolia. There’s a river there flowing next to a mountain range - the Lena - which would be a good natural boundary, in the absence of anything else - the mountains partition the country anyway. Who knows though - it could go so far as the Yenisey river, which ends up at the 80th meridian. Unlikely, though, that Russia would give away as much land as that, assuming they were doing the giving - as opposed to the Chinese just doing some taking.

Another very interesting aspect is the relative inhospitality of the land in question. Any colonization by several hundred million Chinese would have huge problems to solve - extreme cold, rocky terrain. These kind of problems are best solved by technology. Maybe it’s pure fantasy on my behalf, but I can envision the entire eastern seaboard of East Russia becoming a strange kind of distributed Chinese high-tech supercity. Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But those people have to go somewhere, and there’s a LOT of them, and China’s the kind of country to solve these kinds of problems on a grand, centrally planned, high-tech scale.

Needless to say, if China fails to gain the land diplomatically, I expect it would simply be annexed wholesale in the next large-scale war. After all, who’s going to stop them? There are no US bases in Russia. There’s hardly any Russian bases in Russia, for crying out loud. They could just waltz in tomorrow if they thought no-one was looking. And hell, no-one is. Can you imagine America lifting a finger to liberate Siberia? Of course not! The only people who’d care would be the Japanese.

And on that note, if the current diplomatic/popular opinion chill continues, this would be Japan’s nightmare scenario - becoming an isolated outpost, surrounded by a yawning gulf of hostile Chinese territory. They must know this. So I would expect that sooner or later, we’ll see the Japanese leadership begin a concerted, multi-year effort to win back the Chinese government and, by government-controlled media extension, people - probably coinciding with their economic recovery, some technology transfer, and a whole lot of money changing hands. Who knows what the future brings, but I look forward to Sino/Japanese cooperation, at least in Space Exploration. And a combination of the events I envisage here, and a thawing of Sino-Japanese relations, could herald the possibility of a rail link to the new Chinese mainland via Sakhalin island to the near North of Sapporo.

Fascinating topic. The world is going to have a very interesting next 50 years, and the map below shows where all the action will be:

Welcome to the Left Wing Guide to Political Arguments. In today’s lesson, we will learn how to convincingly defeat the Right Wing Enemy’s straw man tactics. Listen to this conversation:

Left Wing (LW): The West is evil!!
Right Wing (RW): Why?
LW: The West is evil and it is inhibiting the cause of social justice and oppressing Africa!
RW: Why? Are you against capitalism?
LW: I didn’t say that. You are creating a straw man.
RW: Do you disagree with their foreign policy?
LW: I didn’t say that. You are creating a straw man.
RW: Do you think there should be more aid for Africa?
LW: I didn’t say that. You are creating a straw man.
RW: Do you think there should be less aid for Africa?
LW: I didn’t say that. You are creating a straw man.
RW: Do you think there should be more economic development in Africa?
LW: I didn’t say that. You are creating a straw man.
RW: Do you think every person in Africa shouold be given a MILLION dollars?
LW: I didn’t say that. You are creating a straw man.
RW: Do you think that aliens from outer space should help us fix Africa?
LW: I didn’t say that. You are creating a straw man.
RW: Do you think that Father Christmas should give every African a pony?
LW: I didn’t say that. You are creating a straw man.
RW: Do you think that magical elves should sprinkle fairy dust while we sleep?
LW: I didn’t say that. You are creating a straw man.

(continues for 270 pages)

Well, I’ve fumed over my friend Greg’s awful post for a few weeks. Time to deconstruct it, line-by-line.

He claims to have had a dream about his pet non-cause, “social justice”:

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