Happy New Year, 4708

by Bryan

5 comments

1 cookie jill { 02.14.10 at 1:20 am }

Happy New Year to you, too. May your Tiger year not crouch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agoWlTARFIY
.-= last blog ..Buying Flowers for your Valentine? =-.

2 Badtux { 02.14.10 at 3:16 pm }

Today’s Chinese tiger is more high-tech than that of yore. A Chinese acquaintance in China sent me the latest rendition of the Tiger. He is very much a high-tech tiger, glowing with electronic ray tracing magic and quite indicative of where China has been, and where it sees itself going.

BTW, no, we do not talk politics, we assume we are being watched. We talk music and software engineering, both of which are safe subjects. The closest we’ve gotten to politics is when I had to pull down some music videos from YouTube to share with him because he could not get to YouTube, and even there we didn’t talk politics, just treated it as an act of nature, like a flooded road or something, that we had to take an alternate route around.

– Badtux the China-watching Penguin

3 Bryan { 02.14.10 at 5:09 pm }

Jill, my “tigers” are curled into circles and only come out for food in cold weather. 😉

Actually, I spent a lot of time looking for a folk art version, but they really don’t look much like tigers. This is a modern watercolor Asian version, that is obviously more realistic.

Yes, China is emerging and moving at the same time as the US is retreating.

My bother was working in Hong Kong for a few years, and he still has trouble adjusting to the change in status when he talks to friends there. He isn’t good at being oblique, and doesn’t like censoring himself.

4 Badtux { 02.14.10 at 5:29 pm }

Well, in my case, I’m allergic to hypocrisy. I can’t see that I can criticize the Chinese government for torturing people and for “disappearing” people into secret prisons when my own government is doing the same damned thing. Same deal with censorship of the news media, if you look at our news media it’s owned by the same small set of oligarchs who own our government and it imposes its own censorship to frame issues to benefit the oligarchs, so criticizing Chinese government censorship of the news media over there would cause my hypocrisy allergy to flare up too.

So it’s pretty easy to censor myself — pretty much anything I would criticize the Chinese government for doing, I’d have to be a hypocrite to say it, because the U.S. government has done either the same thing or something even dumber. E.g. the YouTube issue… yeah, that’s stupidity on the part of the Chinese government. But is it as stupid as invading Iraq — the one and only country in the Middle East (well, other than Egypt, Syria, and Israel) where al Qaeda was not welcome in 2003? I think not. Not to mention that a million plus have died because of that U.S. stupidity, and AFAIK nobody has died because China stupidly cut off access to YouTube…

– Badtux the Hypocrisy-allergic Penguin

5 Bryan { 02.14.10 at 6:00 pm }

I don’t disagree that the US has no standing to criticize other for human rights violations any more, especially since the current government refuses to investigate or prosecute those involved for openly political reasons.

BTW, my brother likes to criticize everyone’s misdeeds, including the US. He got into a bruising fight when he started complaining that a school bond was a good idea, but the money should be spent on something educational, like teaching Mandarin, rather than on athletics which only benefit a few students and don’t provide people with useful skills.