Mystery Translator.

Under the section heading “Not lost in translation” in Forward:

# The translator also preserves English words to highlight the secular nature of proposed educational reforms — edyukeshun for state-mandated education and test for a test administered by the state. #

That took me aback for a second: can’t even NYT reporters spell correctly ? Then I understood: those are transliterations of words written in Yiddish, which are transliterations of words written in English. I’m not sure I would call that “preserving English words” when the concepts involved are apparently so alien in the Hasidic community that there are no Yiddish equivalents.

Let me preserve a German word by transliterating it into English: dooldoongshtarre. Is anyone the wiser ? Here’s a hint: it means unconditional submission to the will of another.

“Undermining secular prosperity” is not what the article reports on, but bringing up children so that they can’t cope at all outside of their “community”. To go no further than financing – whether to subsidize such schools is a matter on which Jews and non-Jews can and will vote.

But I suspect this is a case where an outsider’s viewpoint may not be all that illuminating.

That’s surely the reason why the Times had their article translated into “an extraordinarily high-quality Hasidic dialect of Yiddish”. Take it to the top.

Wrth gwrs.

(And now I see that my last question is answered at the end of the article – I was having trouble getting access, and trying to read a slightly garbled version I’d copied into word. I’ll go away and stop making the comment section untidy.)

The thing about universal compulsory education is that (though assuredly a Good Thing in the abstract) it has in practice been intimately tied up with the idea of Building a Modern Nation State, which until recently also entailed the deliberate destruction of minority cultural identity and languages (and still does in some parts of the world), often from quite genuinely idealistic motives. (Wales was the target of this, as a deliberate government-inspired language-eradication policy, in the nineteenth century.)

You don’t need to be an American-fundamentalist-style home-schooler* to experience a certain wariness about the government deciding what your children will learn and how. And I say this as one who is extremely dubious about “faith schools” and the like in a UK context, and actually does think that children should all go to the same local schools together.

In the UK, this issue has been weaponised by right-wing bigots objecting to Islamic schools, and often spreading deliberate falsehoods about what happens in them, which makes it harder to discuss the underlying issues sensibly; but at the very least, the state ought not to be asking parents to do violence to their convictions in order to send their children to school – and segregated schools ought not to be the only escape from this, either.

* A lot of the American missionaries I knew in Nigeria wouldn’t even think of not home-schooling in the US. This strikes even Brits as religiously strange as me as bizarre: though even here I know of a school where teachers are required to promise not to encourage the pupils to go to university. Way to go, deluded co-religionists!

@Jen in Edinburgh: You make a very important point, and one that I would like to elaborate a bit upon. While this community is doing an admirable job of preserving their language (I wish I could speak fluent idiomatic Yiddish the way they do), the culture they are trying to preserve is not actually an especially traditional one—not at an economic level at least. The nominal goal of a young male Yeshiva student is to, as an adult, remain a full-time scholar of Jewish lore—particularly the Torah, of course. This was not a lifestyle that was available to impoverished Ashkenazic Orthodox Jews in the old country, in the nineteenth century and before. It is basically an innovation, created in post-Second-World-War New York and Israel.

In Israel, the Haredi community receives quite a bit of direct government support, because Israel’s system of proportional representation. Communities of Haredi votes cast their votes as blocs, for “religious” parties that can act as kingmakers, partnering with the larger parties as part of the country’s coalition governments. The religious parties main demand as coalition partners is support for a strong welfare state, in a particular form that is advantageous to their Haredi constituents—supporting Orthodox families so that the men do not have to do work other than Torah study.

Ironically, I know less about the economic practicalities of how the Haredi communities operate in New York than I know about them in Israel. This may be because the ultra-Orthodox in America are much farther outside the mainstream of Jewish culture than they are in Israel.

Many generations have studied the holy books, and it seems unlikely that new generations are going to come up with striking or novel insights

I can’t speak for Talmudic study or Qur’anic scholarship, but (Christian) Bible study continues to produce novel insights. Part of this is simple scientific progress in understanding of the relevant cultural and historical background (which, paradoxically, we moderns actually know more about in many ways than our predecessors who were actually closer in time to the events), the languages (understanding of Biblical Hebrew is better now than ever before since the language ceased to be spoken), and the history of the texts; a maybe even more important part is that the text needs to be (in a sense) reinterpreted in every new generation: not just “what does it mean?”, but “what does it mean to us, now?”

That’s the story at least for academic Bible study; on the Protestant-style personal Bible-study level it’s a major intellectual endeavour just to catch up with what the clever bods have already discovered. There’s a lot of it. I suppose that’s more like the vocational training aspect of Bible study. (I’m leaving out the devotional aspect of Bible study, but that’s something that every reader needs to work out for him/herself.)

I think the “vocational training” aspect is prominent in traditional Islamic scholarship, too: if you’re going to be an Islamic jurist, for example, there is a great deal of sheer learning about the Qur’an and the Hadith to be done, and a great deal to master when it comes to the principles of interpretation and application to everyday life.

And after all, it’s not as if Classics departments have all come to the conclusion that they should now peacefully disband on the grounds that nobody is likely to come up with new insights into Aeschylus or Tacitus after all these centuries. Or that Classics dons do nothing all day and can’t think of anything worth publishing because it’s all been done already.

here’s an article (af yidish, mit an english taytsh) from katle kanye, one of the most visible hasidic voices writing in yiddish about the godawful, abusive system that passes for education in nyc’s courts.

there are over 150 years of yiddish songs, poems, fiction, memoir, and reportage describing its horrors – every single detail in the NYT article, and in the years upon years of documentation and alarm-sounding from Yaffed and many others, can be found in them. the beatings. the rote memorization. the rejection of critical thought. the hostility to learning of any kind beyond the rabbinic canon. the lack of literacy in kids’ native languages.

and that last is a vitally important point, especially here.

quite aside from its two primary purposes – educating loyal followers for the rebbes, the rabbinate, and the hereditary rich (an interlocking yikhes-bounded ruling class), and laundering government money to help support that ruling class* – the hasidic education system is no friend of yiddish.

yes, there is something of a renaissance of yiddish cultural production in the hasidic world. but the hasidic school system has fuck-all to do with it – it treats yiddish only as a medium.

these schools are sites of study in yiddish, but not of yiddish. there is no significant attention in these schools to yiddish as a language, as a literature, as a cultural tradition. the focus, language-wise, is on getting boys capable of using hebrew and aramaic, the languages of toyre and talmud.

the conventional metaphor is that yiddish is a “handmaiden”, while loshn koydesh** is the bride or queen. but it’s worth remembering that “handmaiden” is a very euphemistic translation. in the contexts the image comes from – which are very familiar to anyone who reads toyre** – it means “chattal slave”, with a strong implication of “acceptable to rape”.

yiddish deserves better.
and – much more importantly – the kids in my neighborhood deserve better.

[edited to add: i’m probably not gonna be in this thread much, since i’m not interested in arguing the fine points of whether theocracy is a good idea. these schools – just like the ones that the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of most yiddish-lineage u.s. jews fled in the alte heym – are an abomination, and all i can do here is point folks towards the people and organizations who’ve survived them and are trying to end them, which i’ve done above.]

.
* i’ve cooked enough grant-funded books and done enough grant-writing for schools in my day (never at the same time, i hasten to say), and know enough about the economics of the court i live near, to make an educated guess at how little of those millions go to teachers and staff at these schools. and shitty pay for (abusive) kheyder teachers is another thing with 150+ years of songs, stories, and reportage behind it.

** i want to disagree a little with Reuven about “o”/”oy” in yiddish words that come from hebrew & aramaic. it’s not about regional differences (like most of the problems with YIVO transliteration) so much as the built-in biases of YIVO’s transliteration scheme. YIVO’s preferred transliterations for loshn-koydesh words are deeply arbitrary and inconsistent, and not based on any clear differentiation between registers. which is the thing here: yiddish speakers, in general, say these words with “oy” in all but a very few, formal and liturgical, registers (and sometimes in them as well: “adoyshem” being an excellent hasidic-euphemism example). there really is no meaningful reason for weinreich (himself not a cradle-tongue speaker, it’s always worth mentioning) to prescribe “loshn-koydesh” on one page and “moser” on another.

(I actually tried to read the article in Yiddish. Had to give up very quickly – I don’t know the Hebrew words, and I’m not exactly used to the letters – but did notice very soon it’s in a coherent orthography that is not the YIVO standard.)

Eli Spitzer:

I think actually one of the quibbles that I had in terms of the accuracy of the piece in the Times is I felt that they sort of underplayed the significance of how much better secular education is in girls’ schools. I think the Times has sort of a throwaway comment, if I remember correctly, of saying, “Yeah, it’s better, but still 80 percent of girls failed some standardized tests,” or something to that effect.

“I think”? The article isn’t even behind the usual paywall. Just read it again. That the secular education is much less bad in girls’ schools is mentioned at some length, and illustrated in the figure of test scores. It does, after all, go against all stereotypes of patriarchal religion; that’s “news fit to print”!

The argument against the use of Welsh and its banning in schools right up until my parents’ time was often that it would lead to financial impoverishment and the curtailment of life opportunities for children unless they were made to use English.

Of course that argument was flat-out wrong: it’s not knowing Welsh that led to (or contributed to) financial impoverishment and the curtailment of life opportunities, it was not knowing English. Up until the mid-20th century, lots of people in the West didn’t understand the difference, because they had somehow come to believe there’s only room for one language in one head. (That’s why my dad doesn’t speak Hungarian anymore. He disproved the silliness by picking up perfect French basically the next year without forgetting any of his by-then-native FYLOSC…)

As the article points out, the schools in question leave the boys with a completely inadequate – for any practical purposes – knowledge of English. Yes, the examples given in the article look worse than they are because the English spelling system is so challenging, but the boys don’t just have trouble spelling, they have trouble with grammar and vocabulary, too. Never mind a “bullshit job” as a corporate pencil-pusher in some cubicle; they’re left unable to function outside their community.

It’s similar with other fields of learning. If your arithmetic is below a certain level, you will lose noticeable amounts of money – even if nobody actively tries to rip you off. (And even if all written prices include the taxes, which is not the case in the state of New York.)

A certain minimum of general education is a right. It’s hard to agree on what exactly that minimum is, but it’s really not hard to agree that what the article shows is well below it.

“A certain minimum of general education is a right.”

1. A right as in “you ask a child if she wants it, and if she says ‘yes’, it is her right” or as in “I have the right to force the child to learn it even if parents don’t think it is necessary“?

If it is the former, why no one refers to opinions of children? If is is the latter, maybe it is better to specify that we are discussing our rights…

2. is it also a right of children in uncontacted tribes?

Once the intellect is exercised in one area, its comfort with dialectic and textual analysis can be applied to all sorts of fields.

I remain skeptical. This reminds me of the idea, once fashionable in the UK, that studying the Latin and Greek classics equips a person to govern the far-flung British Empire.

One could say the same thing, surely, about mathematics, or deconstructionism, or Shakespeare, or molecular biology, or baseball statistics…

(The Wikipedia page on pilpul is not exactly a shining advertisement for it).

@drasvi 1. If it is the former [a child’s right to choose whether/what education], why no one refers to opinions of children?

Because if you’d left it to me to choose at age 5/11/14, I’d have made a whole bunch of bad choices, which would have meant I couldn’t enjoy the quality of life I now have. That is, ‘bad’ as I now see with the benefit of education. Did educationalists somehow ‘brainwash’ me into agreeing with them? I don’t think so. Because I didn’t know at that age it was possible to study Philosophy/Music/Linguistics/… Because you don’t know what you don’t know.

I’m sad the education systems these days force kids far too early to make career choices and focus on ‘training’ to the exclusion of critical thinking.

Did I need it to be Latin I studied? No, but I think it does need to be something abstract and fairly disconnected from quotidian concerns.

I’m unconvinced ‘Talmudic studies’ fosters the sort of critical thinking I’m talking about. And I’m not defending the sort of force-fed propaganda of the ‘educational system’ under Xi Jinping, for example. Nor the religious indoctrination that seems to be creeping in to some U.S. schooling.

(I don’t think it’s true “no one refers to opinion of children”: have you talked to teachers these days? who seem to me to spend an inordinate amount of time subjecting themselves to student ‘feedback’.)

2. is it also a right of children in uncontacted tribes?

_Somebody_ has to defend the rights of uncontacted tribes — to prevent their bit of the Amazon or Andamans from getting wiped out. It would be patronising for an outsider to do that without involving them. ‘Involving’ them needs explaining what’s putting their way of life under pressure which needs explaining a whole back story … OTOH in the case of the Andamans, perhaps uncontacting them is the least-bad compromise. Again they don’t know what they don’t know. And perhaps it’s better if they never know. I feel very uncomfortable saying that.

I understand the point of bringing education into line, but a wannabe autocrat can achieve that with private education as well, maybe even more easily than with public education, with tax rules and funding.

I don’t think our own experiences of school are really to the point: our backgrounds meant that we were already the sort of product that the system is supposed to turn out. I’m thinking of something more fundamental than political differences: acculturation.

This is alive and well as an actual objective of our school systems, and it remains the case that the object is to produce the kind of citizens that the state wants: speaking the State Language, able to contribute to the State GDP, and (above all) abiding by what the State feels are acceptable cultural norms.*

There are good arguments that this is indeed what schools should be doing: but that should not blind us to the fact that the system is (a) coercive and (b) intended to eradicate “undesirable” aspects of the child’s home background. What counts as undesirable is decided by the state.
This may well be as it should be: but the issue is neither trivial or beyond debate.

As I said above, I do not myself agree with Christians (or Muslims, or Jews, or Roma) who regard all this as a reason to withdraw their children from the state school system; but their concerns are comprehensible and not paranoid. And the fact that I don’t agree with them may well simply reflect the fact that my own values are not too far out of step with the State’s. (That might not always be so in future …)

* Acceptable Islam, acceptable Judaism, acceptable Christianity. All these things are perfectly fine, so long as people don’t go overboard with them …

There are a couple of things here.
1. I believe originality is best exercised within a framework of assumptions and approaches found in the past to be effective. Are schools wrong to teach these assumptions and approaches with minimal examination, or does this dampen down student originality and creativity?
2. Must teachers try to identify societal biases and encourage debate among students who, due to insufficient knowledge and experience, will only take away a crude simplification from any such debate? I agree you have to start somewhere, but maybe initial debate topics should be something cruder and more rooted in the students’experience?

It’s obviously not impossible to have good government-run education, it’s just that when megalomaniacs get in power that’s one of the things they want brought into line (along with the security services, the press, and the judiciary).
Yes, of course; I wasn’t arguing against that – as you alluded to yourself, Germany has suffered greatly from education steered by megalomaniacs into indoctrination, and before that from a militarised education system that contributed to WW I and Hitler. I was rather arguing against Mencken’s view that all government education is inevitably indoctrination. (And I get the points DE makes, I just can’t answer to them in the detail necessary, cause my family is calling to me to get in the car already 🙂 ).

Nazi math textbooks routinely worded math problems in ways that heavily implied “isn’t it horrible how much this costs, shouldn’t we rather…”. Examples have long been included in the history schoolbooks here.

Got a link for me ? Just curious what would “cost so much”. Taking Baustatik seriously, perhaps ?

What kind of history book ? About science ? For Gymnasiasten ? I can take it from there.

All I need is an ankle bone.

NS condemnations of “non-intuitive” science are well-known – relativity, 4-dimensional spacetime etc. But a “costs so much” objection to something mathematical is new to me. I can’t think what that might be.

Mathematics is free, only mathematicians need money. One objection to math would thus be: was nichts kostet, ist auch nichts. The opposite of what you’re saying.

It surprises me. But maybe that’s only because I operate on the principle: when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

I know nothing about Rosh Hashana evening services. Do they tend to get contentious over NYT articles ?

@Stu: was DM referred to was not the cost of maths, but using math problems for propaganda, like calculating the cost of supporting what the Nazis deemed “unworthy life”. You can find examples here (scroll down to “Beispiele zeitgenössischer Rechenaufgaben in Schulbüchern”).

Hans found it.

Creativity comes into play in story writing well before the story can be called an essay. In math… I don’t think creativity goes beyond different paths to the same solution.

@Hans: thanks, I see now what was meant.

It’s interesting that setting up such school math problems costs almost nothing in effort. There’s a lot of work involved in dumbing people down, but it’s pretty easy given the right attitude. Was nichts kostet, ist auch nichts.

I remember seeing or hearing of examples where people have their own native language but are literate in English only

Very common in Africa. In fact, when I was first learning Kusaal and attempting to communicate with patients in it, Kusaasi colleages would sometimes interrupt me to say of the patient “He’s literate, Doctor”: meaning “He speaks English.”

rozele, my deepest salutes to you.

I just happened to run today into a cartoon representing how one orthodox cartoonist views secular schools:
https://twitter.com/michaelzil/status/1573605651623837696

The Hebrew on top reads ‘Back to school’, and in the appropriate places (r. to l.) ‘welcome’, ‘torah’, ‘alcohol’, ‘Hello class’ and (in tiny letters on the phone screen) ‘boom’.

I’d like to think it was sometimes misinterpreted, but it was published in a (Litvak) Haredi newspaper and was to reinforce what its readers were already thinking.

“He’s literate, Doctor”: meaning “He speaks English.”

@DE, wow, that’s beautiful!

@Bathrobe While there is a portion of the Chinese curriculum that is focused on political indoctrination, the Chinese education system is mostly designed to teach knowledge — of mathematics (to a higher level than many Western education systems), science, foreign languages, Chinese, literature, etc. The Chinese do not let political rigidity interfere with the education of their children, because it is the quality of that education that will allow China to continue to develop and become powerful.

(Gosh this thread’s moving fast — sorry to drag it back to all of … yesterday.)

I’d agree that used to be the case; like @Hat, I’m unconvinced Xi is today upholding those values. In any case, _still_, Chinese technology advances mostly by stealing from the West. You might point to the rate of their filing patents: my info is they’re mostly tiny advances in improving Western-developed technologies; what Popper would call ‘Technology’, not ‘Science’.

This is a huge problem for Taiwan with electronics (and therefore for the U.S./the West in general): the Taiwanese are genuinely innovative (a lot of it by partnering with the U.S.); currently the bulk of their manufacturing is in the mainland (they’re furiously trying to move it anywhere else); continually the PRC is trying to bribe/steal their best people — to the extent Taiwan now has legislation that anybody in high-tech who goes to work in the mainland is permanently banned from returning/or working in high-tech upon return.

I’d also question the PRC’s abilities at medical innovations: their vaccines are notably ineffective compared to the West’s; neither do they seem to have ‘reverse engineered’ the West’s to improve their own.

foreign languages, Chinese, literature, you mean non-Chinese literature? Please explain how a language learner can advance when the Great Firewall prevents them keeping up with current language use. Xi seems to be actively discouraging students going abroad to study.

And a more general question to the floor — coming back to schools teaching by rote/a body of knowledge rather than ‘thinking’ skills: what’s the trick for encouraging critical thinking in some subjects (say Maths) but balkanising that thinking to only ‘safe’ topics, not (say) the manifest bullshit getting fed by the CCP?

I’m asking because the most astute political critics I remember from school were studying Maths, not Social Sciences. I found myself somewhere in the middle: studying Maths, Physics (mostly rote stuff), Economics — where we had a tame Trotskyite who could only regurgitate dogma.

@drasvi
I would like to give two examples from Ireland.
1. The taoiseach made a statement to the effect that Russian invasion of Ukraine is incompatible with holding a seat on the UN Security Council.
2. A journalist made a statement to the effect that this was the first time a nuclear power was going to be defeated conventionally by a non-nuclear equipped enemy.
To me, these illustrate a gap, not just in factual knowledge, but in more general understanding of history and the workings of institutions like the UN. These are not stupid people, they just live in a bubble where certain information and analysis is by convention not presented.

China now fully embraces science and technology as essential to its development.

I would have though it obvious from what I said that I’m well aware of that. Stealing semiconductor manufacturing technology is not “a late 19th century thing”. Engineers Found Guilty of Stealing Micron Secrets for China, Taiwan raids 10 Chinese firms poaching chip engineers — and that list could go on and on, but I suspect Hat’s spam filter will barf. tsmc — Taiwan’s highest-tech chip manufacturer — is planning a huge plant near Kaohsiung, at what is really unfeasibly high costs, except it avoids sharing their technology into the mainland.

Have you lived and worked in China? Not Taiwan, China.

I’ve lived and worked in Hong Kong before the hand-back/before Xi. This was in a entrepôt corporation that traded extensively into the mainland.

Unless you have, I don’t think your impressions hold much water.

Getting accurate information is as hard for those within China — even for those trying to run it — as for those outside.

Given the level of suppression of information within PRC these days, I’m unconvinced the impressions of somebody living/working in one particular city carry more weight than mine observing from outside. At least outsiders have means to grab and preserve outbreaks of dissent before the censors shut them down.

Taiwan media does channel the many sides of debate within China.

I think you can allow me credit for being able to detect Western “rhetoric” just as much as you’re crediting Chinese students with detecting “shortcomings”. Are you saying ‘tofu construction’ is not a thing? That having to tear down half-finished apartment blocks hasn’t wrecked the Ponzi scheme of property investment? Or that a whole bunch of dams didn’t collapse/could only be saved by flooding downstream this Summer? That the South-North water transfer Project is not in continual strife? (Since you’re concerned about holding water heh heh.) What does that say about Chinese technology?

And yeah fair counterpoint that much U.S. infrastructure is now shaky. But at least it was well-constructed to start with, and has lasted its design life.

I’m sorry if I sounded less than credulous. Some of your previous comments have suggested to me that you are getting a lot of your information from Language Log.

Yes, all those criticisms of shoddy building are fair. But on the positive side, China now has one of the best high-speed railway systems in the world. China is putting people into space. That is not the result of a tinpot technological base, even if the technology was stolen. (The Japanese also stole a lot of technology in the early stages, which people don’t mention any more. And Japanese space exploration is a joke.)

There are lots of horror stories about cheap, shoddy manufacturing in China, especially in its early stages. But China is slowly but steadily lifting its game and continues to do so. Maybe they are not yet ready to take over the world but they are a force to be reckoned with.

I don’t think Xi is completely bad for China. Beneath that Western blather about a totalitarian state there was a lot of crap underneath (abuse of authority, fake stats, doing things for show to please higher ups, stealing children, stealing people’s dogs for the meat trade, fake goods, criminality at the local level, shoddy standards, the list goes on and on). Xi is actually trying to deal with this but rooting out these problems from the top is a gargantuan task. Despite this, I think that the overall trend is towards improvement. As I said, not rosy but by no means to be written off.

drasvi: offer their service as guides in exhcnage for the opportunity to practice English

Unless things have changed, quite a few of those who approach you on the street to practise their English are just trying to get you into a scam. Avoid them like the plague.

similar remarks about earlier dictators

Apparently the Fascists didn’t get the trains to run on time after all.

@hat, de
Why make the trains run on time when you can spend less money on a controlled press and a small but dedicated internal security corps, served by informants who will gladly provide information for a nominal (or zero) fee? I think you would both fail Despotism 101.

Hat, you have got to be kidding.

I despise and fear Donald Trump and what he stands for, but fair’s fair, there is one good thing that he attempted to do: that was to extract the US from its constant, neverending string of overseas invasions and wars. Sure, the US is a “democratic” country, but that hasn’t stopped it from waging almost continuous war during its existence. It had only got the war against the indigenes in the West out of the way when it decided to occupy Hawaii and old Spanish territories as far as Asia.

Maybe Biden is better than Trump, but he seems to be more aggressive and old school in his foreign policy attitudes — which is not a good thing.

When I say Xi Jinping is not necessarily bad for China, I am talking about things like the constant abuse of power in the lower reaches of the Chinese military and bureaucracy. The idea of China being a “totalitarian dictatorship” is laughable; the sloppiness, abuse of power, and even collusion with criminal elements at the local level can be egregious, not to say the exploitation of their privileged postion by the national elite. To say that Xi may have had a good influence in that respect is not to “shade everything in his favour”. I don’t like the man or his policies, but at least I can see that the outcome may have good aspects for China. Sheesh.

Bathrobe: depends on your metric of “good for China”. GDP? Human Rights Index?

Heh. We hit the same example.

Well, the resulting opportunities might explain why he had some support, and why some look back at his rule with nostalgia. That’s important history. But I agree that it shouldn’t be used to diminish the horrors.

@hat
There are several issues.
1. If something is objectively bad, for me it is not useful to contend it is better than something subjectively worse.
2. If something is objectively bad, is it capable of improvement or being constrained?
3. If something is objectively bad and it is removed (think the witch in The Wizard of Oz), what is most likely to replace it?

Interesting comments. I’m no expert, but if Xi and Putin can’t properly be called totalitarian dictators, then OED needs revision.

For some unexplained reason, I find it easy to imagine Johnson as a cake.

The anti-Zionist religious parties are playing the long game. They can’t afford to stand on petty principles. Mild compromises are made and everyone’s happy. Everyone who counts, anyway.

drasvi: It is indeed “pictures of women”. Voices of singing women are shunned as well.

Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga:(

– Бонд. Джеймс Бонд.
– Дамм. Ван Дамм. Клод Ван Дамм. Жан-Клод Ван Дамм…

Elderly Kusaasi still call shoddy workmanship zapan. The fame of postwar Japanese quality control standards reached even unto inland rural West Africa.

Apparently the Fascists didn’t get the trains to run on time after all.

Nope! Mussolini managed to convince enough people that they were now running on time, but they still weren’t.

I despise and fear Donald Trump and what he stands for, but fair’s fair, there is one good thing that he attempted to do: that was to extract the US from its constant, neverending string of overseas invasions and wars.

What… the actual…

Donald Trump tried to start a war with Iran in June 2019. That was in the international media. Ten minutes before the first missile was supposed to be launched, Putin or Erdoğan phoned him and got him to cancel the order. Did you seriously manage to miss that while it was happening?

But, sure, trying to blackmail Zelensky is different from the US invading the place itself… though, in hindsight…

Maybe Biden is better than Trump, but he seems to be more aggressive and old school in his foreign policy attitudes — which is not a good thing.

Biden is the first POTUS in a long time to actually defend democracy instead of just using that as an Orwellian slogan.

the morally null Johnson

A perfect description that reminds me of the morally and intellectually null Gernot “Gernull” Blümel, Austria’s former minister of finance, who for example once forgot a zero (Null) in the federal budget.

Did you seriously manage to miss that while it was happening?

Yes, I did. I think I was travelling in China at the time.

But unlike Obama, who was a good, nice, reasonable guy who just managed to keep American embroiled in foreign conflicts, that nasty Trump arsehole did make moves to withdraw from them. Afghanistan, for one. But yes, you are right, Trump was inconsistent in everything he did, from economic policy to foreign policy, mostly ruled by his amygdala.

Xi’s instinct, like that of many strongmen, seems to be to centralize control in his hands

騎虎難下

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A8%8E%E8%99%8E%E9%9B%A3%E4%B8%8B#Chinese

It’s the Mugabe problem. There comes a point where retirement is likely to prove rapidly fatal.

@drasvi (and DE, who made similar points):
Meanwhile the process that made you a modern Geman and not a Bedouin does not annoy you. You don’t even reflect on it and if you’re an English speaker rather than an educated Iranian, you can’t even imagine that it is possible to be different until you come to Iran.
Naturally, nobody grows up in a vacuum. But if the culture you grow up in is open, it will give you opportunity to reflect on the process, to show alternatives and encourage you to explore them. I think that the system I grew up in tried to do that; for me personally, it also helped that I had parents who were open and interested in foreign cultures (both my parents knew English and had English and American friends, my mother knows French and my father some Italian and spent time in Italy). But even the provincial Gymnasium in a quite conservative Catholic area of Germany that I went to promoted a degree of debate and openness that allowed us to understand that there are many ways of doing things.
I see the point that this system might have been less welcoming to people from a non-Western culture. But here, I think, the question is not so much whether state education for such people necessary equals indoctrination or oppression and therefore is wrong, but what the goals and content of the education should be. It should enable them to participate in the society they live in while acknowledging their own cultural background and allowing to develop it, at least as far as it’s compatible with the society they live in. And for many children with an immigrant background in Germany, government school education is the best or even only way to actually obtain the knowledge needed to successfully participate; in my view the problem is not that they have to undergo that education, but that it’s often not up to the task due to lack of funding and commitment to the task of integration by the education bureaucracy and politicians.

Virtually the entire world recognises Taiwan as part of China.

No: most of the world adopts the U.S. policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’. (I except the poor countries that are getting monster hand-outs from Xi under the ‘belt and road’ initiative. “poor” both in the sense of impecunious; and in the sense to be pitied, because he’s now going to slowly strangle them.)

But I can see further argumentation is pointless: there seem to be matters of bare fact on which we can’t agree. Yes to an extent Xi is amping up policies and attitudes that were already prevalent. No he didn’t have to pursue that route to such extremes. No he didn’t have to institute genocide in Xinjiang/Tibet. (I’ve been carefully avoiding drawing parallels with Hitler (Östpolitik) or Stalin, but on that, I can’t slide a cigarette-paper between them.) It’s reached the point where gradual quantitative change has morphed into qualitative change. And at the nexus of a collapse in the domestic housing/mortgage market (which was equally inevitable, ‘socialist economics’ notwithstanding) — so he’s now got to find something to divert domestic dissent.

I don’t think the blame will entirely lie on the Chinese side.

Xi with HK did not have to break faith so rapidly and sharply with the terms of the hand-back. If he’d continued ‘one country two systems’, the Taiwanese would at least have been more amenable to some sort of similar arrangement. As far as Taiwan is concerned, for HK _all_ of the blame lies with Xi. BTW Biden has just sold them an enormous quantity of high-tech military equipment.

It’s the Mugabe problem. There comes a point where retirement is likely to prove rapidly fatal.

Hmm? Jiang Zemin is still alive, and gets trotted out at the occasional party plenary.

The more wild-eyed Western China-watchers continue to talk of a ‘Jiang faction’, and explain the anti-corruption drive as rooting out Jiang supporters. I find it difficult to believe Jiang is in any sense active as a focus for dissent — not even as a figurehead.

So Xi could retire to rest on his laurels — indeed the sooner the better, it’s about to get a whole lot worse for his ‘legacy’. But no: this Autumn he wants to get re-appointed for another 5-year term — which will in effect mean for life.

This has all been a long time coming; Xi has just decided that the time has come to be more assertive. … the Chinese armed forces,

seeing Xi as another ruthless, vicious dictator are two separate issues.

Reading back the debate, there’s perhaps something I’ve not made clear. This is nothing personal about Xi. He’s a figurehead/cipher/political representative for the armed forces. Getting rid of him individually won’t make a jot of difference. (Historians will debate forever to what extent Stalin became as much enchained by the monster he’d created versus him arriving there by intent. The fact of the worse parts getting dismantled rapidly after his death suggest there was nothing inevitable. China’s military-political complex OTOH seems far more organic. Of course they command much better tools for thought control — or at least for dissent control.)

The PLA (to the extent it’s distinguishable from Xi/the political leadership) might reflect they’ve never engaged in an actual shooting war; and observe how Putin’s ‘professional’ army is going in Ukraine.

Then observe they’re doing a terrible job of winning ‘hearts and minds’. “China to double down on Taiwan unification efforts” says one headline. “China’s Foreign Minister threatens violence against Taiwan before United Nations” says another. “Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be ‘devastating’ to world economy: Blinken points out Taiwan invasion would be catastrophic for global semiconductor supply chain”.

The more Xi/the military back themselves into a corner of threats of force; the less likely bare force (in the absence of soft power) will be effective.

But of course you’d have to have studied history/politics/the ineffectiveness of cultural hegemony to understand that. Which is where we came in …

China has always believed in the One-China policy.

Taiwan likes to point out that Taiwan has never been part of the territory of CCP’s ‘One China’. To find a time when Taiwan was ruled from Beijing, you have to go back before 1895. _Before_ there was a CCP. I don’t suppose Chinese schools are teaching that.

Personally, I’m fine with a unified China under President Tsai Ing-Wen. I think she’s doing a fine job.

But of course you’d have to have studied history/politics/the ineffectiveness of cultural hegemony to understand that.

AntC, I think you should drop the condescending tone. It doesn’t help your argument one bit.

I have also been concerned about the power of the military to influence policy in China. I personally don’t see any evidence, though, that the military are in charge. I do think that China’s leadership is emboldened by its increasing military power — a result of economic prosperity, and ultimately reform and opening up. Which is why many anti-China hawks seem to think it was a mistake to engage with China and allow it to join the WTO.

drop the condescending tone.

The satirical tone was aimed at those within China rewriting/obliterating Chinese history. I’m not suggesting anyone here is unaware of the history.

It was a mistake to let CCP be the sole representative of China at the U.N., and then at WHO. Joining the WTO should have been on condition — with genuine sanctions — of opening their economy and not stealing IP. Also of genuinely implementing labour protections. Also of not using prisoners for cheap labour (that is, for the ones not executed). (Yes I know the U.S. uses prison labour: the same rules to apply for them.)

@Hans, I do not think that not forcing a child to underwent compulsory education in a state-controlled environment (in a class of German kids as opposed to home-schooling) is cruel.

FGM is.

FGM is

This is so completely accepted in our culture that even to discuss the issue can be quite dangerous*; yet millions of human beings who love their daughters as much as we do disagree (and the pressure not to abandon it often comes from women.)

Incidentally, the practice of male circumcision, as practiced by Jews and Muslims (admittedly much less physically damaging, though much more radical MGM is actually seen in many cultures) has been lumped together with FGM as a precisely parallel “mutilation” perpetrated on children without their consent, and there have been sustained attempts to make it illegal in Europe.

Last I heard, the only person in the UK to have been prosecuted for FGM was a blameless obstetric registrar whose “crime” was attempting (in an emergency situation) to repair childbirth-induced damage in a woman who had previously been subjected to FGM. His attempts to put things back as they had been before birth were construed as FGM. I much doubt that he would have been prosecuted if he had been white (his own culture does not practice FGM and he was personally in no way in favour of it.) There have been suggestions to make the gynaecological examination of “at risk” (i.e. African) girls compulsory in the UK, so that the Evil May Be Eradicated From Among Us. I think it is reasonable to wonder whether the motivation of all the campaigners involved is completely straightforward, and indeed whether all such campaigners are fully aware of their own motivations.

* In honour of which, I hereby declare that I oppose the practice and think that it should be illegal. The Kusaasi have never done it, though possibly because their culture doesn’t really do rites-of-passage ritual things at all. Some of the most admirable campaigners I know of against the practice are African women who come from societies where it is practiced: they have the right to speak on this (and to be heard.) I’m not convinced that anyone else does.

Yes, indeed there are (Indeed, not so much “even”, but especially.)

FGM does not exist in a vacuum, as some cruel practice simply devised to keep women in subjection. In many African cultures it is (part of) an important ceremony marking entrance to adult womanhood. From outside such cultures it’s easy to pronounce that the FGM is some excrescent rite that forms no real part of the “true” ritual. Our untroubled assumption of ethical superiority makes such discernments straightforward …

I don’t know anything like enough about Islam to know about the place of FGM there. I’ve read that the Hadith support for the practice is accepted by Islamic jurists to be very weak, though. It certainly isn’t entailed by Islam, the way male circumcision is. However, it seems to correlate with Islamic influence in the Oti-Volta area. It is probably not coincidental that the Kusaasi are much less influenced by Islam in general than, say, the Mamprussi, who do/did traditionally have FGM. (It’s illegal in Ghana.)

there is one good thing that he attempted to do: that was to extract the US from its constant, neverending string of overseas invasions and wars.

What David said, but really Trump is not opposed to invasions and wars per se. He is opposed to nation building efforts and any thing that smacks of America giving assistance while not getting anything concrete back. Trump is completely transactional. He simply doesn’t understand why Americans would try to build a democratic civil society in Afghanistan. He is perfectly happy to bomb some Taliban camps as a show of strength and then leave. Remember his idea of how Gulf War II should have been fought was invade Iraq, “take their oil” and then leave. Trump’s vision is sometimes compatible with a “non-interventionist” model but very far from pacifist.

The point is that Taiwan was taken from China by the Japanese and should have been returned along with all its other conquered territories.

Japan took Taiwan from the Qing Dynasty. Taiwan was never part of the pre-war Republic of China, which came into existence in 1912. The Republic of China made all sorts of claims on Qing Dynasty territories that everyone today agrees are ridiculous. It is not clear why the PRC has any greater claim to Taiwan than it does to Outer Mongolia, Khabarovsk or Korea.

at least I can see that the outcome may have good aspects for China

Certainly compared to the Russian government, the policies of the PRC look pretty good over the past 30 years, and even past 10. Still, those of us who have lived in Taiwan or Hong Kong can’t look at what Xi is doing without seeing massive waste, incompetence and cruelty. Chinese people don’t actually require authoritarian governments to thrive, and in fact seem to do much better in a decentralized system with more local control.

I did follow the news in December 2019 and in January. It is one of reasons why I am not ready to claim that Trump is much better than Obama.

But what is the source of information about phone calls from presidents?

Speaking of public images and etc.:
https://twitter.com/TomerPersico/status/1572175365858119680/photo/1

This is an ad for eggs. The face of the four-year-old female was covered with spray-paint. This is presumed to to have been done by someone whose Haredi sensibilities were offended.

“I’m not sure whether you’re arguing with me here or whether you’re just adding your own opinion”

@Hans, sorry for this. I did not mean to argue with you.

The topic was schooling and then DE spoke about cultural identities and then you spoke about cruelty/inhumane practices. There is an overlap between “cultural identity” and both educational practices and cruel practices, DE’s comment does connect both topics. But I wanted to indicate that these are two very different topics.

On a totally different topic from more recently in the thread, I have long thought that being the ROC bureaucrat in charge of maintaining the formal claim to sovereignty over Outer Mongolia from behind some desk in Taipei had to be one of the cushiest/lowest-effort public-sector sinecures out there. But maybe Pres. Tsai’s administration has cut back funding for the position?

@Hans, about abuse: possibly you have a particular example in mind.

Generally, I can’t see why the fact that some society surrounds (literally) some community (like Botswana has surrounded Bushmen) should mean that a child must be unhappy if you don’t “integrate” her.

Not getting integrated can be a bad idea some times and getting integrated can also be very bad some times.

part of the historical region that is today part of Communist China, and “Outer Mongolia” to be the separate (former Soviet client) state.

I think you have that the wrong way about 😉 China, Russia, swathes of Europe are client states of Mongolia — even to Japan and t’Egypt.

This is the trouble (pace Bathrobe, and pace Putin’s claims wrt Ukraine) with going back over historical geographies. At what point in time do you put the stake in the ground? Why then? Why not a hundred or a thousand years earlier or later?

And then the Samoa rugby team renamed itself “Manu Samoa”. New Zealand commentators are most fastidious about using this, to allow them to complain when furriners say “New Zealand” when they ought to say “All Blacks”.

[Author’s confidence in truth of above assertions: moderate to low. Note to editor: Replace this footnote with appropriate emoji.]

Курица не птица, Монголия не заграница

I’ve heard this about Bulgaria, which is of course another good candidate for such, though not quite as much as Mongolia, I believe.

(Tannu) Tuva, next to Mongolia and also theoretically claimed by ROC, used to be one of those in the 1930s, then it did end up formally incorporated (as a part of RSFSR) sometime around WW2.

Taking up moysrim again… there is something I am curious about.

Max Weinreich, in the English translation of his History of the Yiddish Language (1980), volume II, has this to say on p. 682, section 9.7.4:

We have already spoken (8.8.4) about the contrasts os (holem in a closed syllable; O₁) ~ oysiyes (holem in an open syllable; O₃), yordim (holem in a closed syllable; O₁) ~ yoyred (holem in an open syllable; O₃), and so on.

(See also page 387, section 7.16.1)

Unpacking M. Weinreich a little… Yiddish אות os ‘letter (writing symbol)’ is from Hebrew אוֹת ʾôt and had the vowel holem in a closed syllable. Plural אותיות‎ oysiyes, oysyes ‘letter, epistle’ is from PBH אוֹתִיּוֹת‎ ʾôtiyyôt, and had holem in an open syllable. Similarly יורדים yordim ‘impoverished men, men fallen on hard times’ had holem in what had eventually become a closed syllable (-rd-) at some date, perhaps very early (Hebrew plural יוֹרְדִים yôrədîm, with holem in a syllable that eventually closed). The singular is Yiddish יורד yoyred (from Hebrew יוֺרֵד yôrēd qal active participle of יָרַד yārad ‘to go down, sink, be prostrated’), which had holem in an open syllable. I just note here the alternation between oy and o in the Yiddish outcomes of the singular and plural of active participles.

Here is a link to a description of the same alternation from a scholar very much outside the YIVO circle, S. A. Birnbaum in Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar, p. 63 (second edition, 2016).

And so, returning to the moyserim that Hat asked about, and taking Yiddish מוסר as from Hebrew מוֹסֵר mōsēr, qal active participle of מָסַר māsar ‘deliver, hand over, betray’ (rather than from מָסוֹר māsōr, the פָּעוֹל pāʿōl noun (pattern for professions, agents of functions) to מָסַר māsar, following the discussion that Reuven Chaim Klein linked to above)…

In those Yiddish varieties that have the pronunciation oy from holem in an open syllable, the original pattern would have been moyser מוסר, pl. mosrim מוסרים, I gather. For varieties that have the plural moysrim, was the diphthong oy of the singular analogically extended to the plural, yielding moyser, pl. moysrim? Or are there varieties of Yiddish in which the outcomes of Weinreich’s O₁ and O₃ (holem in a closed syllable and holem in an open syllable) simply fell together as oy by regular sound change? Or is something else going on?

what right does the ROC have to claim Taiwan?

I am precisely _not_ making an argument from historical geographies. So your blah blah is irrelevant.

Ask the people of Taiwan whether they want to be governed by CCP. (For that matter, they appear not to want to be governed by today’s KMT.) Likewise, ask the people of HK or Macau.

I was talking about legitimate claims to a territory.

Do you regard the CCP as having legitimate claims to the mainland? (I’m excluding Tibet, Xinjiang.) On the basis that … they turned out over the long term to be more brutal thugs than KMT post-1945? (Sadly there’s no meaningful way to ask the population/which is rather the point. So I might as well declare ex cathedra that CCP has abnegated any legitimacy it might once have had.)

PRC, a state which is almost universally regarded as the legitimate successor state to the ROC.

No: it was not accepted as successor prior 1971. Since then, most other countries follow the U.S. approach of strategic ambiguity.

But we’ve been over this before. We might as well stop.

BTW I’ll be unable to post much here for the next few weeks/don’t take my silence as implying you’re making decisive points: I’ll be in Taiwan. I won’t be entering CCP territories, because I’d fear arbitrary arrest and imprisonment — despite being a sovereign citizen of another country. Legitimacy?

@hat
I suppose I was thinking of examples where an invader or radical revolutionary used the “illegitimate” label to replace a flawed Government with something qualitatively worse, with long-term negative consequences for the unfortunate population.

Some anarchists or pacifists would say that any Government rules ultimately through violence, and I would find it hard to argue against this. But if you do not want to take this position, I think you need to say at what point the use or threat of violence renders the Government illegitimate. There have been various events called “X- Massacre” or “Bloody X-day” in the history of the U.S. and other countries, and many more not labelled explicitly, where more or less peaceful demonstrators were killed by security forces. Is one such event enough? Or does the violence have to be orchestrated in some way? Please note also, I have a very dear friend who was born out-of-wedlock, so I may have emotional baggage here😊.

I find it touching that people seem to believe that if the people of China were given the chance they’d vote the CCP out. To be honest, I personally think they would not, for various possible reasons: brainwashing, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know”, general satisfaction with what the Chinese government is doing, etc. Of course, as AntC has pointed out, they will not be given that chance, but my general feeling is that people in China are reasonably happy with what the government is doing.

And yes, all governments rule through the threat of violence. Remember that the next time you refuse to follow the rules (laws) that the government has laid down.

Covid-19 put paid to most of my Chinese contacts, but I used to know quite a few Chinese students. None of them ever expressed any opposition to the government.That could of course just mean that anything they said would get back to the authorities, but who knows? There is one who from the beginning has been very forthright in her condemnation of the government; however, she is from Hong Kong.

people from Hong Kong for reunification with mainland China, at the time the transfer from British authority occurred.

I was working in HK at the time Thatcher sold it down the river. People were very circumspect/already they were wary. But they were — shall we say — disappointed. Those working for international countries were trying to get overseas postings so they could clock up residency status. (They found it hilarious for Chris Patten to bring in talk of democracy.)

By the time the handover was happening it was inevitable/put a brave face on it.

I was working in HK at the time Thatcher sold it down the river.

I despise Thatcher, but there wasn’t a lot she could have done there.

Thatcher, but there wasn’t a lot she could have done there.

Thanks @DE, quite. I was working for a UK holding-group. Every employee wanted that.

She was willing to send battleships across the Atlantic and engage in an actual shooting war — for a tiny population that she decided were Brits. But of course they were white.

I’m not suggesting military action wrt HK, nor the façade of democracy á la Chris Patten, but if Bathrobe wants to go all legalistic: the Island and TsimShaTsui were just as much (or as little) British territory as the Falklands. HK’s entrepôt status could have been guaranteed by entangling international trade — there were already plenty of U.S. (merchant) Banks with significant presence.

Apology accepted.

You sometimes have a very pugnacious style. (You managed to scare away that nice Chomskyan linguist at a thread earlier this year.) I was being pugnacious back.

In fact, I am defending neither Xi Jinping nor the system that the Chinese inherited from the Soviets. I don’t disagree with many of your comments about the direction that Xi Jinping is leading the country.

Still, there does need to be a bit of balance. Blanket condemnation and rejection is useless. The government of the PRC is the government of China, whether you like them or not. They are not going to disappear in a puff of smoke simply because you declare them ‘illegitimate’. Nor is their claim to Taiwan as illegitimate as you make it out to be.

As you suggest, the Chinese political system is what it is. It’s a political system that has moulded the likes of Xi. I don’t think it could be easily changed by one man, even if he were minded to. Moreover, the damage done to British and American democracy by unscrupulous, opportunistic people working within the system (Johnson and Trump, although the rot goes back much further, and I’ll include Australia’s Morrison for good measure) certainly doesn’t seem calculated to recommend it to the Chinese.

To the best of my knowledge I’ve never been tailed by the Chinese government — I don’t think I was ever important enough for that. As a capitalist running dog from Hong Kong I’m sure you were a much more promising target.

Anyway, I’ll leave the matter to rest here.

Hat, I think Bathrobe’s remarks you quote here were directed at AntC rather than you; at least, I consider him far more pugnacious.

One problem is that of course people will mean different things by “legitimate.” The Communist bandit regime currently squatting in Peiping is as an empirical matter the de facto ruler of mainland China (as well as of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, East Turkestan, and Tibet) and has for many decades effectively exercised authority over that territory without serious challenge. That plus recognition by most other nation-states due to their own realpolitik considerations at various points in time may make it the legitimate government as sort of an empirical matter within a certain amoral worldview. Is it legitimate in some more demanding moral sense? That’s a different question, and is further complicated from my perspective by the facts that (i) I I am not convinced that the ROC/KMT regime was ever the “legitimate” ruler of mainland China and (ii) the current legitimate government of Taiwan headed by Pres. Tsai mostly has better things to do with its time then play-act at being a government-in-exile of the mainland. There has perhaps been no morally legitimate ruler of mainland China since 1912 — and even empirically/amorally there were very few years between 1912 and 1949 when the nominal ROC government that the Western powers recognized exercised effective de facto rule over all or almost all of the territory it claimed, what with first regional warlords and later Japanese invaders having de facto control of quite a lot of total acreage. (The Manchu regime like its predecessor dynasties was not the result of free and fair elections, but did meet the traditional criteria of legitimacy for rule of China as established in China’s own illiberal political/cultural tradition in a way that IMHO the Communist bandit regime does not.)

As to hat’s naive Rousseauean decrying of wicked governments that want to keep people in chains due to their own perceived propensity for wickedness, I will retort (w/o getting into the matter of original sin) with the famous quote from Burke:

“Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”* Unless and until soi-disant anarchists figure out a way of reliably producing more self-disciplined humans than the current batch, we are going to be stuck with some degree of coercive government, with the degree of such government that is minimally necessary varying notably from time to place depending on the level of internal control a given society manages to socialize its members into.

*Bob Dylan’s pithier “To live outside the law you must be honest” is consonant with this theme.

Yes, Hat, I was replying to AntC. Although the pincer attack from a PCR-hater (?) and an anarchist, each on what seem to be rather different grounds, did make things more difficult.

JWB’s comment on anarchism cum “the need to physically enforce law/morality” brought to mind one of my main reservations about anarchism: the presence of out-and-out criminals and psychopaths in society. It’s fine to assume that if people are left alone they will all be good and honest, but there seems to be an element that makes a living by preying on society — the drug operations, thieves, pickpockets, etc., etc., etc. Perhaps I am being naïve, but it seems that any society needs some kind check on this kind of behaviour. Ok, a huge area of debate — think “A Clockwork Orange”; the fact that the current government of China has perhaps been more interested in maintaining political control (or the appearance thereof) than in controlling crime; the fact that there is all-too-often corrupt collaboration between criminals and police (the stuff of hard-boiled detective stories)…

I am completely aware that the above is full of holes (I’m thinking as I type) and I’m sure Hat has thought this through far more thoroughly than I have, so I welcome his feedback, including scorn for my naïveté.

Belief in the innate goodness of human creatures if left to their own devices is so contrary to all of the empirical evidence that it is, to be charitable, an ignorant belief, or perhaps a belief held on a priori ideological grounds not subject to falsification by empirical evidence. The arguments for anarchy or near-anarchy that are IMHO more plausible are those that instead focus on the fact that any would-be exercisers of coercive authority over other humans inevitably suffer from the same defects as those they would rule over. But Burke’s point is not so much that coercive government is necessary but that how much coercive government is necessary varies, and depends on the particular historical circumstances of a given society at a given point in time. Which IMHO ought to inspire one to think about what historical/cultural etc. circumstances tend to create populations who need comparatively less rather than comparatively more of that sort of regrettable thing.

@AntC: French history is an extremely distressing study of the repetitive succession of one badly flawed regime by another. I am willing to concede that France had a legitimate government as recently as the reign of Louis XII (+1515). Maybe more recently than that, but I haven’t dug into the details deeply enough to be willing to commit.

The moral case for Anarchism strikes me as perfectly sound: ever since the first lugal put one over on his fellows with all that agricultural revolution lark*, the absolute morality of compulsion from above has depended entirely on the notion that a thief can legitimately leave his loot to his offspring and/or his mates.

The difficulties are entirely in the practicalities.

I can conceive that there may be solutions to the thief/psychopath problem which are compatible with all but the most ultraist Anarchist principles (perhaps by medicalising such things, though that is a can of worms … to put it mildly.)

Moreover, Marxist-adjacent as I am, I can subscribe to the idea that most (though not all) sociopathy actually arises from the iniquitous effect on individuals of out current far-from-just regimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_away_of_the_state

More difficult is the question of how the world could ever get there … is Anarchism in one country viable? (On the parallel Marxist question, it seems Trotsky was right and Stalin was wrong …)

Seems to me that Anarchism is a long game. The ultimate objective of Socialists … trying to get there directly won’t work.

* This seems to be actually a Just So Story. It looks like many pre-agricultural societies were thoroughly hierarchical, and in modern times Kusaasi peasant farmers got on just fine without chiefs until they were attacked by their Mamprussi neighbours (and, indeed, for a long time after that, too.)

On further reflection, if one considers the work of James Scott on “anarchist”* societies up in the hills in Southeast Asia, internet discourse about how to get from here to there may be self-defeating, since one absolute sine qua non of an anarchist society in his schema is a steadfast refusal to become literate – literacy inevitably being the handmaiden of tax-collection and military conscription and etc etc. Rejecting literacy is in his schema almost as important as rejecting rice-cultivation as a major food source.

*The societies in question had well into the 20th century fairly impressive track records in evading forced amalgamation into imperalistic flatlander-ruled nation-states, whether Chinese, Burmese, Thai, or whatnot, but whether they were perfectly free of internal hierarchy and coercion is perhaps another issue.

it thus behooves those interested in the flourishing and survival of comparatively-less-oppressive governments to try to understand just what it is they need in order to flourish and survive

Is the standard answer that what is needed is a broad middle class, not satisfactory enough on either observational or theoretical grounds?

@ Crawdad Tom

I appreciate your comment. I agree about the face-saving and ideological aspects on the part of the PRC. I personally would like to see the status quo continue.

My point was that legalistic arguments like “Taiwan stopped being part of China before the PRC ever came into existence, and the PRC has never exercised control over Taiwan; what claim does the PRC have on Taiwan?” are not quite the clincher some people seem to think they are. The viewpoint of the PRC has good grounds, and simply denying the “legitimacy” of the PRC is not a valid counterargument.

One problem, of course, is that the PRC’s stances are inconsistent. The Qing claimed (and held) Taiwan, and as a successor state to the Qing and then the ROC, the PRC not unreasonably expects to regain Chinese territory that the Japanese had earlier seized and were forced to relinquish after the war.

When it comes to the South China Sea, however, the Chinese stance is completely different. The South China Sea was never claimed by the Qing — that was an action of the delusional ROC government in the late 1930s (IIRR). And yet Chinese propaganda would have us believe that China has owned the South China Sea “from time immemorial”. This claim is based on flawed arguments by Chinese intellectuals under the ROC, that the presence of Chinese shipwrecks, Chinese cargoes (porcelain, etc.), Chinese maps, and Chinese sailing directions in old documents prove that the South China Sea belonged to China. This is a complete fiction and utter nonsense, but as we all know, China is a past master at manipulating ancient documents for its own purposes.

Mongolia is an interesting case. The Mongolians took the view that Mongolia was a possession of the Qing but was never part of China (meaning “China proper”, the eighteen provinces). Mongolia thus had every right to withdraw when the Qing fell. The Chinese counter with (again) legalistic claims that the Qing signed international treaties with foreign powers in the name of “China”, in which they treated Mongolia and other territories as “part of China”. Under this interpretation, the PRC has a perfectly valid right to all the old Qing territories, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Outer Mongolia, and Manchuria.

While the stench of bullshit hangs over a lot of Chinese territorial claims, for “face-saving and ideological” reasons (as you have pointed out), the Chinese are dead set on regaining Taiwan at some time in the future. Unfortunately, it is probably only a matter of time before they are militarily strong enough to do so.

When China took over Hong Kong, it was generally believed that Hong Kong was too valuable a goose to slaughter. With its economic and technological progress, China seems to have become increasingly confident in itself. Xi Jinping does indeed appear to have concluded that the Hong Kong goose can be slaughtered, although he was (let’s face it) partly pushed into that position by increasingly violent anti-PRC demonstrations.

Let me reiterate though: I am not supporting a Chinese invasion of Taiwan; I am merely pointing out that arguments “proving” Taiwan isn’t part of China are actually rather weak.

@Bathrobe

And I appreciate your comments. I guess what I want to say is that I don’t believe the idea that the PRC as “a successor state to the Qing and then the ROC” really has a valid claim to Taiwan. True, the Communists defeated the Nationalists, but the Nationalists were not wiped out or disbanded. They moved to Taiwan, where they had already set up in 1945 after the Japanese surrender, and since that time it has been as I said before: the ROC has continued to exist, in a very different form, and gradually developed (through much suffering by a lot of people) into a democratic system that is still the ROC. Taiwan is a democratic country, with a popularly elected president and legislature, it has its own military, it does business all around the world, and very, very few people here want to be governed by the Chinese Communists. The PRC has no right of any kind to take over Taiwan. I understand that it is dead set on doing so, but there is nothing right or legitimate about it.

[I]f you were born a couple of thousand years ago, what could you do with the insight that keeping other humans enslaved was irredeemably evil?

There were, in fact, Greek philosophers (or at least one) who believed this a couple of thousand years ago. I can’t think of their name(s); they exist in fragments, as of course only Aristotle got copied.

The Communist bandit regime currently squatting in Peiping is as an empirical matter the de facto ruler of mainland China (as well as of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, East Turkestan, and Tibet) and has for many decades effectively exercised authority over that territory without serious challenge

(1) Surely Manchuria has been overwhelmingly Chinese since well before 1949?

(2) Do you really still say “Peiping”? I thought that went out with Dean Rusk.

I can’t claim any expert knowledge on this, and may need to beat a hasty retreat when my errors and misunderstandings are pointed out. However, I seem to recall that in the days when the Republic of China was no more democratic — not much more than a puppet state of the USA — than the People’s Republic of China, there was one thing that both sides agreed wholeheartedly on, that Taiwan was a part of China. So the view of the Republic of China was that the government in Taipei was the government of all China. Didn’t the parliament contain hundreds of old men representing districts on the mainland and vastly outnumbering the representatives of districts in Taiwan? Most of the old men must have died by now.

@AC-B: Members of the ROC national legislature elected in 1947 from mainland constituencies that subsequently fell under Communist occupation (and who accompanied the KMT regime into exile on Taiwan) continued to serve (albeit under a regime where the legislature didn’t have much real power) until the earlier of their individual deaths or 1991. I don’t know how many were still alive in 1991 when the rules were changed. I wouldn’t call the KMT regime on Taiwan a “puppet state” of the U.S. back in the relevant decades – it was an authoritarian regime that relied on U.S. support but did not always reliably do what the U.S. government of the day might have wanted it to do rather than sometimes pursuing its own agenda and relying on its various supporters within the U.S. to be able to block the administration of the day from doing much about that. The historical process by which the actual government in actual power in Taipei eventually lost any genuine enthusiasm for play-acting as the government-in-exile of the mainland (other than as necessary to, ironically, avoid antagonizing the Communist regime on the mainland by not treating Taiwan’s de facto independence from the mainland as de jure) took many decades and was not necessarily a smooth and linear one.

@Rodger C.: The name of Peking was changed to Peiping when the KMT decided in the 1920’s to make Nanking the capital of the ROC instead, as it had been in various prior periods in Chinese history. The ROC/KMT regime AFAIK never decided to switch back; that was a Communist-bandit decision (as both Peiping and Nanking had fallen under their occupation) which from a theoretical ROC perspective may still lack legitimacy. That said, I suspect most atlases published in Taiwan these days do not attempt to maintain that position (and ditto the usage of Taiwanese government spokespersons) and I don’t use that name myself outside of certain historical or rhetorical contexts.

Separately, the standard modern poli sci account is that electoral systems that combine single-member legislative districts with first-past-the-post conditions for winning a district’s seat by plurality tend strongly toward having only two major parties. This is “Duverger’s Law,” although “law” is probably too strong a word because it’s a tendency that’s not exceptionless.

Both of those key conditions have been traditionally present in elections in most parts of the U.S. most of the time, inherited from pre-1776 English practice. But I don’t think either is actually mandated by the federal Constitution. If California decided, through a process consistent with its own constitution, to divvy up all 52 of its seats in the federal House of Representatives by proportional representation in a single statewide ballot, that wouldn’t obviously violate the federal Constitution although it’s certainly possible it might violate certain federal statutes that would need to be repealed or amended to allow the change. Members of the U.S. Senate, by contrast, are necessarily selected from single-seat (well, double-seat, but typically with only one seat up for election in a given year) constituencies, although a minority of states now provide for run-offs (or the simulated run-off of a transferable-vote system) rather than allowing for victory by plurality if no candidate gets an absolute majority of first-round votes.

Separately, the standard modern poli sci account is that electoral systems that combine single-member legislative districts with first-past-the-post conditions for winning a district’s seat by plurality tend strongly toward having only two major parties. This is “Duverger’s Law,” although “law” is probably too strong a word because it’s a tendency that’s not exceptionless.

Indeed, and AFAIK some further research (and simulations) suggested that at least in some cases, intra-district systems other than FPTP*, and/or multi-member districts with only a few members, would result in the same pattern.
OTOH it turns out that regional parties (or in some cases even single-district independent candidates) can sometimes overtake the major parties in their regions, so there are often much more than two parties actually represented in the legislature. This hadn’t been much of a thing in the USA (excepting sporadic “independents canvassing with…”) for several decades, and I’m not actually very sure why.

As a side-note, it turns out that many of the alternatives to single-member districts very much do require formalized parties to function**, much to the detriment of any independent candidates and/or splinter factions. (Case in point: Ayelet Shaked, the current Israeli interior minister, who is trying to run for Knesset as her own faction, and probably won’t be able to get in because her faction is so small.)

 
*) Of course, in a single-winner election, if there are only two candidates (and they are not exactly tied) then almost all sensible systems will produce the same winner as FPTP, and if more than half of the voters prefer one particular candidate to all the others, most*** sensible systems will produce the same winner as FPTP. AFAIK those two scenarios [the first being technically a subset of the second] cover the vast majority of elections in the USA.

**) IIRC it’s possible, technically, to run a multi-member election without formalized parties, and indeed AFAIK technically something very much like that, masquerading as proportional representation, had been the case in some elections in Australia.
In some, especially lower-level, contexts it might also be possible to get away with a FPTP-like election where the top X candidates pass instead of just the top 1.
Actual proportional representation, however, does in fact require formalized parties to function.

***) Score-based systems, Borda voting, and some other similar systems can let a popular second or third choice beat a majority first choice that is strongly unpopular with the minority, especially if there are many other candidates down the ballot. Technically in some score-based systems even a two-candidate election can go for a minority choice.
In Borda voting this can actually quite easily happen by accident if there are several competing groups and candidates unaffiliated with rival groups are artificially raised in the voters’ scoring.

(1) Surely Manchuria has been overwhelmingly Chinese since well before 1949?

(2) Do you really still say “Peiping”? I thought that went out with Dean Rusk.

I think JWB was speaking ironically by adopting this quaint old language. I’m surprised he didn’t use “Formosa”.

Question: Which name is older, Taiwan or Formosa?

“Formosa” is only an “exonym” (given by the Portuguese) if you accept that Taiwan (named in Chinese after a particular place on the island) is “Chinese”. Did the native inhabitants have a name for the island before the Chinese came?

@Bathrobe: Well, it’s an example of what the Kids These Days disparage as “settler colonialism,” innit? “New Zealand” is an exonym until the majority of the population is of European/non-Maori descent, but then it’s an endonym.

Question: Which name is older, Taiwan or Formosa?

As a name for the entire island, Formosa is indeed older (1542). “Taiwan” appears to be (a slightly mangled form of) the native name for a village, and/or a tribe (which is now known as Taivoan), near the spot where the Dutch established their colony, which was very quickly extended over the entire island by metonymy.
Of course, as Y correctly pointed out, the locals (used to) speak many very distantly (if at all) related languages, so even if they did have a name for the whole island, they probably had several. AFAIK no such names (prior to the Qing takeover) are actually attested.

It struck me that the Chinese probably had a pre-1542 name for the island, and indeed they did: Liuqiu. However, this seems to have been used as a generic term for the entire island chain forming the southern boundary of the East China Sea, and Japan co-opted the name for its own part of the chain – the modern Ryukyu islands.

So calling Americans “Yanks” is an example of an exonym? (Or is it an exonym that has become an endonym? Or an endonym that became an exonym and later became an endonym again. I’m a bit unsure about all of this…)

Ah, so ‘septic’ is rhyming slang based on an exonym…

Everything is so convoluted.

I’m not saying that there necessarily aren’t any (Northern white) Americans still alive who self-identify as Yankees, but I can say that no such person has ever, to the best of my recollection, so self-identified in my presence. Although the fact that I am not a New Englander may limit my perspective?

South China Morning Post is totally in the bag for Xi.

It certainly sounds that way. Note how it says:

“Xi made it clear that the next five years under his leadership is mission critical to the vision of China becoming the leading power in the world by mid-century in two stages – first by completing modernisation by 2035 and then by becoming a pacesetter and goal-setter of global development by 2050.”

The Straits Times has a (paywalled) article that starts: “Whatever personnel and policy changes emerge from the 20th party congress, China’s ambitions and revanchist ethnonationalist goals will endure.”

The “revanchist” bit is the fact that China wants to reclaim the place it held before it was bullied, oppressed, and partially dismembered by the Western powers. I suspect a lot of Chinese would agree with that assessment. Getting Taiwan back is part of the revanchism.*

Get ready for a rocky ride.

*By these lights, Putin is also a revanchist.

In Japan, Yankee refers to a certain kind of delinquent young person and their fashion tastes. It is a style designed to look strong and intimidating.

Or so Wikipedia tells me.

I heard the term quite a bit but was never totally sure what it referred to.

Denmark uses a sort of hybrid system where about half the seats are chosen in districts of varying size, and the rest are filler mandates that will normally make the numbers come out as if the whole country was a single constituency. Historically, I think proportionality has only been broken once when a comedian without party affiliation got a district mandate — he would not have been able to get enough signatures to register a party and he would not have been able to pass the 2% threshold to have filler mandates allocated, so under true proportionality he would not have got in.

@Lars, @Hans, NZ has similar ‘Mixed Member Proportional’.

In one strongly right-leaning constituency, the right-centre ‘National’ doesn’t stand a candidate. This enables the very-right ‘ACT’ to get a toe-hold despite their national vote being well below threshold 5%.

So far the centre-left ‘Labour’ doesn’t adopt a similar tactic, but in recent elections ‘Greens’ have comfortably cleared the threshold.

Sounds as if “with Chinese characteristics” now simply means “doubleplusgood.”

@JC, yes, except all the filler mandates are localized to specific larger districts. I’ll elaborate in the next post; this started as a temporary post because Akismet and I won’t have time to do a proper job within the edit deadline.

and by God you’re expected to empty your glass (whereupon it’s refilled for the next toast).
Heh. I was once in a situation (back in the 90s) where I was accompanying a delegation from various Central Asian republics to Shanghai. After a dinner, we were invited to drinks, and as the Chinese side only had an English-Chinese translator, I was asked to translate Russian-English. After two bottom-ups of Maotai (one of the vilest spirits I ever had to drink), I told the hosts that they could choose between either me translating comprehensibly or me continuing to drink, and they gave me a dispensation from drinking.
If you’re interested in the outcome, the Central Asian side drank the Chinese side under the table; nothing beats Soviet training.

Taiwan News reports on Xi’s speech

Got a 404.

the Central Asian side drank the Chinese side under the table

As I would expect. And not something to be especially proud of.

Although it loses out to the Russian/Central Asian variety, the Chinese heavy-drinking culture is pretty vicious, leading to something resembling a dictatorship of drunks. If you can’t drink, your prospects for getting anywhere in politics, business, and society are limited. This is just my personal opinion, but any culture where your masculinity and powers of leadership are judged by your ability to imbibe large amounts of poison is seriously distorted.

My take on the culture of drinking in China is at The culture of drinking in China, written not long before Xi Jinping came to power. Better analyses and descriptions have been written since but most have similar things to say.

… drinking culture, but in the former USSR, that had a lot to do with lack of trust. 

Yes, in the movie ‘Death of Stalin’, after a heavy drinking session the main characters are all desperately trying to remember what they said, and especially what S said.

My take on the culture of drinking in China is at The culture of drinking in China
A lot of that also holds for Soviet drinking culture as I experienced it in 90s Central Asia. Women, especially Russian and Kazakh, participated more strongly; if they wanted, they could get a pass or stick to wine or beer, but I met a lot who drank on competitive levels with men. Toasting was equally important.
Do the Chinese have an equivalent to the position of Tamada – normally a respected person neither host nor guest of honour who determines when the next toast is said and by whom? These announcements are often small pieces of art themselves, and there are professional Tamadas who are hired for big events like weddings.

Yes, in the movie ‘Death of Stalin’, after a heavy drinking session the main characters are all desperately trying to remember what they said, and especially what S said.

Time for a spot of boasting. The music in Death of Stalin was composed by my nephew, Christopher Willis. (I know which a lot of it sounds like Shostakovich, but it isn’t, though it was certainly inspired by Shostakovich.)

 a lot of it sounds like Shostakovich,

Props to your nephew. I indeed spent lots of the movie trying to guess which of Shost’s pieces the music was from. I thought I knew his symphonies and suites pretty well. Turns out I did.

(The only tamada I know in Chinese is the curse word 他媽的 ta ma de.)

233333333333 🤣

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the best teachers of Breton are drunken Assyrian ladies.” — attr. J. Austen.

She did not tell what was on other days, but I think our Lord made it so that all days of a year were adopted by some saint.
But women discussing men generally have every reason to get drunk (to whatever degree).
Было бы, что выпить, а повод всегда найдется.

@AntC: “Yes, in the movie ‘Death of Stalin’, after a heavy drinking session the main characters are all desperately trying to remember what they said, and especially what S said.”

That was more about Stalin taking pleasure in humiliating his lieutenants, enjoying their (self-)abasement. Catching them off guard had its value too, but they were all very closely watched anyway. Probably wiretapped as well.

Although a it’s a black, grotesque comedy very loosely based on facts and memoirs, some say the movie was prophetic. Having watched a semi-televised meeting of Putin’s “security council” before the February invasion of Ukraine, lots of commenters said it was a like a movie scene and a plurality named The Death of Stalin.

There are typically dozens of saints (many quite obscure, but if you need something to celebrate, you can look them up …) for every date of the calendar year. One quick reference for recognized-by-Orthodoxy saints for today (New Calendar today) has chronological coverage running from a lady mentioned in the New Testament to a New Confessor of the Bolshevik Yoke who survived until 1963. It is also, in both (New Calendar) East and West St. Crispin’s Day today, and one of the wackier political news stories of the day is that one of the more eccentric (to use a neutral word) members of the U.K.’s Parliament dated his resignation letter from his cabinet post (getting out of the way of the new Prime Minister) thusly rather than as Oct. 25.

St. Barbara is a more interesting case, perhaps, because her feast day falls during a fasting season in which the faithful are presumptively to refrain from wine unless the date falls on a Saturday or Sunday. But there are always disputes about how important a saint needs to be for his or her feast day to override that default and make wine appropriate and St. Barbara may have the necessary clout. (This year the feast falls on a Sunday, so the override issue does not arise.)

Trumping mere saints, Lugh of the Long Hand may have been the patron god of cobblers; this perhaps accounts for why his instance Lleu Llaw Gyffes and his uncle Gwydion disguise themselves as cobblers in Math fab Mathonwy. Or not. As you may think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lugus#Inscriptions

Props to your nephew. I indeed spent lots of the movie trying to guess which of Shost’s pieces the music was from. I thought I knew his symphonies and suites pretty well. Turns out I did.

Perhaps a little explanation won’t come amiss. Christopher deliberately set out to compose music of the sort Shostakovich might have written in similar circumstances. Plenty of people have been quite sure that it really was Shostakovich they were hearing, so apparently he did a good job. It’s not his expert subject, however: he did his doctoral work at Cambridge on 18th century music in general and Domenico Scarlatti in particular. Neither of his parents, and neither of his two brothers, are particularly musical. The picture of him on his Wikipedia article was taken by me, though it doesn’t say so.

That hotbed of Socialism, the Economist, has described him as a “grotesque”, and “more fit for a museum than for the Cabinet.” (I disagree on the latter point: he is a fake antique.)

(Also described Nadine Dorries as “a cabinet toady.”)

It is to be regretted that the perhaps Shakespeare-besotted younger Rees-Mogg did not instead note the date as the feast of the Holy Martyrs Marcian and Martyrius, Notaries of Constantinople. Byzantine-restorationism has much undone work even amongst the most reactionary-seeming Young People. (Although some youngish UK dude with the hopefully-fictitious name Henry Hopwood-Phillips is doing good pro-Byzantine work on the internet.)

@Barthribe (sic)

I think you’ll find all the countries around the South China Sea make claims. (And Japan/S Korea/N Korea/Russia are disputing the islands between them — I’m pretty sure PRC would be making claims there too, if it weren’t for N Korea as their proxy; and Japan/Taiwan/Philippines dispute the islands to the East of Taiwan. PRC also piggy-backs on any claims Taiwan is making.) There is disputed territory between China/India and between India/Pakistan.

So what? All governments are evil. We can still point out some are more evil than others.

We are past the age when U.S.A. just sends gunboats to strategically significant islands. (Or Britain just asserts its rule over Rockall or The Falklands.)

If some country makes a claim of dubious legality and other bordering countries don’t make a counter-claim, they’ve as good as ceded the game. The aggressor is the country sending warplanes and armed naval vessels across the Median line. Or parking fleets of armed ‘fishing boats’ ha! and building military runways on disputed atolls.

Not the site of a future Club Med.

Rockall (I had to look it up).

It’s a rock, that’s all.

If it had been known early enough, I’m sure a stylite-type hermit would have tried. Or a whole series of them in rather short succession.

I’m imagining a huge funnel for rainwater…

Back to September 26th!

But unlike Obama, who was a good, nice, reasonable guy who just managed to keep American embroiled in foreign conflicts, that nasty Trump arsehole did make moves to withdraw from them.

Obama tried a lot of things, but, for fear of being seen as an Angry Black Man, he put way too much emphasis on the broadest consensus possible and ended up doing half as much as he wanted.

Trump, with the opposite personality, simply called the Taliban in and handed them Afghanistan, with mixed results. He also handed the Syrian Kurds over to al-Assad, also with mixed results, and so on.

Östpolitik

Ost-

I do think that America is edging closer to war with China

That’s flat-out impossible, just like the most dread war between Russia and NATO: both sides have nukes, and neither side is ruled by people who look forward to dying.

MAD reliably works on everyone this side of Iran-in-the-early-1980s.

I certainly agree that the rhetoric has been heating up on both sides in recent years. It could end up causing all sorts of unpleasantness – short of a war.

Donald Trump tried to start a war with Iran in June 2019.

I missed this too, but that’s because I don’t follow the news. But I found a NYT article about it, and they pointed out that the called-off air raids were very like the not-called-off air raids on Syria in 2017 and 2018, which were not referred to as “trying to start a war with Syria”.

The ones on Syria were purely symbolic. They were announced in advance, so the planes were removed from the air bases in time, and did almost no damage.

The PLA (to the extent it’s distinguishable from Xi/the political leadership) might reflect they’ve never engaged in an actual shooting war

They did, in 1979, against Vietnam. They lost it…

But of course I have no idea what over 40 years of modernizations have changed.

But what is the source of information about phone calls from presidents?

Being important, they’re always documented.

a pertinent question might be: what right does the ROC have to claim Taiwan?

Like AntC, I find this question entirely wrong-headed. That way lie Reichsbürger.

The right question is: what right does the democratic republic that exists on that island have to call itself ROC? That’s a matter of international law (see North Macedonia).

We can’t change things until and unless we recognize where they have gone wrong; if enough people recognize it, they will figure out what to do about it.

Reminds me of: “Free your mind[,] and your ass WILL follow.”

My first wife used to complain that my friend Dave and I spent half our time shouting “You stupid idiot!” at each other.

Like brothers! 🙂

While the stench of bullshit hangs over a lot of Chinese territorial claims, for “face-saving and ideological” reasons (as you have pointed out), the Chinese are dead set on regaining Taiwan at some time in the future. Unfortunately, it is probably only a matter of time before they are militarily strong enough to do so.

The “building an invasion fleet” part seems not to be happening. It seems to me that PRC talk of gaining Taiwan, like Iranian talk of getting the Zionist Entity off the map, is purely domestic politics.

The two-party system seems to be written into the U.S. Constitution.

I take it you haven’t read it, or you’d have noticed the complete absence of any mention of parties. How it got baked into the practice of American politics in very short order is another story.

It was inevitable because of the combination of 1) the members of Congress being elected individually in FPTP elections, 2) the positions of head of state and head of government not being separate, 3) this position being elected individually, and 4) the very fact that parties aren’t mentioned, let alone regulated, in the Constitution.

Omnia

That’s the neuter plural; the feminine (and masculine) singular is omnis. Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae…

True.

@AntC

I am not trolling. I am merely pointing out that the PRC inherited its extreme irredentism from the ROC. They do, after all, claim to be the successors to the ROC, which is essentially the basis of their claims. (One difference is that they have renounced the Chinese claim to Outer Mongolia, unlike the ROC).

When people rail against the PRC for its unreasonable irredentism, it is good to remember that they are simply reasserting claims that had already been made. I don’t like them, but I don’t like the previous lot, either, high on their “historically this all belongs to us” steroids.

Your claims of “legalistic nit-picking false moral equivalence” are just mouthing off since you don’t have anything particularly constructive to say. In fact, all I’ve got from your multiple posts is that you like Taiwan/the ROC and don’t like the PRC.

what right does the democratic republic that exists on that island have to call itself ROC?

I am sure that a lot of people would like to call it the Republic of Taiwan, but that would be regarded as extremely provocative by the PRC, and I suspect there is a powerful lobby on Taiwan that would not be happy at abandoning the status quo.

I am merely pointing out that the PRC inherited its extreme irredentism from the ROC.

So PRC chose to continue like squabbling schoolkids: ‘Mine!’ ‘No, mine!’.

The adult approach would be to say: those claims are precisely the sort of Imperialist clap-trap that we (as Communists/anti-Imperialists) stand against; the KMT/RoC claims over the South China Sea are equally absurdly imperialist.

That would still be consistent with wishing to re-unite the actual former territories of Empire, including Taiwan.

That would be consistent with assisting Vietnam in throwing off the neo-imperialist U.S.A. puppet government — without entailing a claim on Vietnam itself.

you don’t have anything particularly constructive to say.

I advocate for the democratic republic on Taiwan, as a beacon of — you know — democracy. Encouraging indigenous and non-Putonghua languages and cultures. That is, as it is today. It wasn’t always so; I wouldn’t be advocating for the republic under martial law.

I “don’t like PRC” because of the warplanes and live-fire marine drills all round Taiwan and — you know — the imprisoning and killing citizens in Tibet and Xinjiang. That sort of thing.

LH, it does. I disagree with whatever I find disagreable. When ALL posts about the are believed to be “pro-Ukrainian” by their authors, then all my objections will be to “posts believed to be pro-Ukrianian” – irrespectively of my own position.

I have been accused of “legalistic nit-picking”. I’m sorry, but legal claims go with the territory. Countries claim territorial waters and EEZ according to international law. The claim that the ROC was the successor state to the Qing is a legal assertion of legitimacy. The ROC advanced various spurious arguments to justify its claim to the South China Sea, which were taken over by the PRC. Both the ROC and the PRC continue to uphold this claim, and the ROC continues to occupy islands in the South China Sea based on it. The Philippines went to court to get a judgement that the PRC claim to the South China Sea had no legal basis. They won their case, but it has (obviously) not swayed the PRC, which makes trumped up claims about Japanese judges on the International Court of Justice.

When the talk on this thread turned to the PRC’s territorial claim on Taiwan, a key argument trotted out was that the PRC had never exercised control over Taiwan. I pointed out that this was a very poor argument. I am not a lawyer but yes, I was using legalistic arguments because legalistic arguments do count. It’s not just a matter of “I don’t like that government, so anyone who defends their claims on legal grounds is automatically a secret sympathiser”.

When I pointed out above that the PRC territorial claims were a reassertion of earlier ROC claims, I was not presenting this as a defence of the PRC. I was merely noting that the PRC, as the self-perceived successor state, was simply taking over earlier ROC claims. If the ROC had not made such claims, I suspect that the PRC would not have made them either, so the ROC has a certain responsibility for creating the current situation. (Taking over predecessor’s claims seems to be reasonably common in Chinese history. The Ming claimed Tibet based on the fact that the Yuan had incorporated Tibet into the empire, even though, as far as I know, the Ming never exercised control over Tibet during the entirety of the dynasty.)

For pointing this out I was accused of “false moral equivalence” and taking the attitude that “Hey, they both make silly irredentist claims so how can anyone choose between them?” As far as I am concerned, the fact that you personally like one government (which is in no position to enforce those claims) and dislike the other (which is in a position to do so) is a completely subjective, partisan attitude and should be treated as such.

The democratisation of Taiwan was a “good thing”. So were Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” and Jiang Zemin’s move away from the doctrinaire definition of the Chinese Communist Party as the party of “workers and peasants”. Xi Jinping’s assertion of centralised party control over the whole country is indeed a backward step. But personally disliking Xi Jinping’s policies and actually trying to understand what is going on are two different matters. AntC doesn’t like what XJP is doing. Fair enough. But that is far from a balanced attitude. Maintaining that the PRC should be doing x because that is the “adult approach”, or that Taiwan has now gone democratic so that changes everything just strike me as personal preferences. Even if I don’t like what XJP is doing, I do try to see where the other side is coming from, unlike some commenters here.

The corollary of your position is that if it were the Republic of China (democratic or otherwise) that had taken control of the South China Sea you would support it. I find that a very strange attitude. The issue I’m discussing is territorial claims, not whether I am a supporter of the government of the PRC or the ROC (Taiwan).

“Rockall” by Flanders and Swann.

Once upon a time in Europe, people understood how to not take antique paper claims as serious irredentist claims that military policy needed to protect against. When the U.S. became independent, it cast off its allegiance to the monarch formally known at the time as “George the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith” etc. The claim to the throne of France had been completely nominal since the end (maybe well before the end) of the Hundred Years War, but it was still put on coins and official documents and whatnot by all English/British monarchs through and including Geo. III. (It got dropped in 1801, perhaps in part as a gesture of solidarity with the exiled Bourbons against the Bonaparte menace.) Obviously there were lots of conflicts between England/Britain and France during those centuries, but making the “King of France” title an on-the-ground reality was never (from the Tudors forward) an actual goal or policy, and this was understood equally well on both sides of the Channel.

Re, would the wicked KMT regime have liberalized under different historical circumstances, one perhaps ought to look at the parallels of other illiberal and authoritarian regimes in the same region of the world that the U.S. (as well as, ahem, the Australian governments of the same period) long excused the imperfections of for Cold War realpolitik reasons, such as South Korea, the Philippines and (Suharto-era) Indonesia. They all eventually loosened up to a considerable degree, innit? Although the hypothetical timeline in which mainland China is not occupied by Communist bandits is so different from the post-1949 timeline we actually lived through I guess it’s hard to figure out what else might have been different in consequence of that.

“Rockall” by Flanders & Swann: backstory and lyrics.

I suppose it is my responsibility to carry on the legacy of Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus and denounce the imperialist propaganda of Flanders and Swann. Rockall (from Irish racálach “seaweed”) has been Irish since Saint Brendan discovered it in the sixth century on his voyage to the Holy Land via America.

This, by the way, is the position of the government of the ROC on the South China Sea:

<a href="https://en.mofa.gov.tw/theme.aspx?n=1462&s=40&sms=294#:~:text=The%20South%20China%20Sea%20Islands,the%20sea%20is%20beyond%20dispute.&quot;. They appear to claim only the islands.

On liberalisation I think the action of V. Havel, viz. a blanket amnesty for those imprisoned for political “crimes” is instructive. Following this action (and conceivably related to it), there was a “spike” in reported child abuse cases. The amnesty was a simple and fast solution, but perhaps a slower and more complex (and illiberal?) approach (e.g., retrials taking account of all the evidence collected by the police, not just the evidence used to secure the convictions) would have been preferable on balance.

I’m just perplexed that Bathrobe seems so protective of the PRC and so contemptuous of Taiwan.

But I’m not protective of the PRC and contemptuous of Taiwan. If that is what is driving your stinging rebukes you couldn’t have got it more wrong.

What I am pointing out is that some of the rabid PRC-phobic attitudes here — attitudes I can well understand — are pushing people to lose perspective. I won’t try to rehash everything I’ve said, but essentially XJP is continuing and amplifying, as well as accelerating, an existing trajectory; while reform and opening up has put the country where it is, it has had some negative consequences, which XJP is in some ways trying to fix (I don’t want to quibble over details because any good points can also be put in a negative light); and discussions of territorial issues here also ignore the background, which includes the ROC’s crazy claims.

It’s alright to intensely dislike XJP’s PRC, but not to the extent that you lose all perspective. Despite (or because of) the convoluted history of the issue, the PRC does have at least a reasonable claim to Taiwan that can’t be dismissed with frivolous arguments like “But they’ve never controlled Taiwan during their entire existence”.

Ok, I don’t like dictators, either, but what is happening in China could have some pretty large implications for the world’s future, and simply crying “I don’t like the bastards” (which is what I’m seeing here) isn’t a very constructive way of looking at the way ahead. AntC’s concerns and criticisms are legitimate (although more personal and visceral than cool and reasoned), and I’m not dismissing them. I’m also sad to see the way the country is going — although there’s nothing I can do about it — but I wouldn’t like to predict the future, nor the results of what is going down in China, just on that basis. Basically, I don’t think it’s wise to reach conclusions about China based on a single-dimensioned dislike of the current leadership.

I might further add that any implied claims that the government of the PRC isn’t a legitimate government of the country (even if they hold water!) aren’t much use in discussing China. China is what history, including the leadership of the PRC, has made it. It’s not all bad, which you will soon find out when you live there. Both the ROC and the PRC have left their mark on the country, for better or for worse. That is why I find it puzzling that people are so strident in rejecting everything about the PRC, and especially XJP. It’s easy to categorically reject both, but it doesn’t get you very far.

I’m sorry if I can’t explain it in more relatable terms. Essentially I’m finding the crazy PRC/XJP hatred here rather hard to stomach, even though, as I’ve said, I’m not a fan of XJP’s.

At the risk of leaping into a subject I know little about, I don’t understand the contention that modern China retains some sort of legal claim on Taiwan. The communists overthrew the previous government, but the Kuomintang held on to Taiwan. It seems bizarre to suggest that the PRC ‘inherited’ rights to China from a government that it defeated, but not completely.

China’s claim to Taiwan is sentimental only, as far as I can see. Invoking ‘international law’ is misguided, seeing as there’s really no such thing. And the reason other countries haven’t recognized Taiwan formally is purely a matter of realpolitik.

@br
There seem to be two things here:
(1) not being treated as a “real” country like, say England, Greece or Turkey, which exerts sovereignty over very offshore islands
(2) these offshore possessions (because “rocks”) not being allowed to convey economic benefits (territorial waters or allow Taiwan to form part of an interest group, e.g. the way Falklands allow Britain to be part of “adjacent to Antartctica” nations group)
(1) is bizarre, but (2)?

I think it’s ok if states engage in some performative diplomacy like Israel and US storming out some anti-Israel conferences (and maybe some of those conferences themselves) or Chinese wolf-warrior diplomats yelling at Americans or whatnot. Until someone begins killing people it’s all fun and games and after that it is not.

(2) is also a diplomatic nod to other claimants in the sea, supporting them without sustaining any real loss, damage, or sacrifice of the interests of the ROC itself.

In the total context it is bizarre. The ROC is still pretending to own China as well as the South China Sea islands, even though it doesn’t. The whole statement makes them look like a laughing stock. Even if you’re pro-Taiwan you should be able to see that. If they spoke only for Taiwan it would be much more convincing — but as has been pointed out above, they can’t do that.

An uncontroversially-independent Taiwan would still be one of the littoral states bordering the South China Sea and thus as potentially well-positioned to make aggressive claims regarding particular rocks and islets therein as mainland China or Vietnam or the Philippines or Brunei etc etc. An independent Taiwan might also well succeed to the pre-1945 Japanese claim to many of the rocks/islets in question, some of which were allegedly historically used for various purposes by the Japanese navy at times when no one else in the area was in a position to practically object or interfere. Wikipedia sez that when the French (via their Vietnamese colonies) first began to assert formal claims of sovereignty back in the 1930’s, both Japan and the mainland-only ROC objected. I assume (although wikipedia doesn’t make this explicit) that the Japanese objection was based at least in part on its then-sovereignty over Taiwan.

might make a move to take Taiwan over militarily

1) continued lack of the kind of fleet needed for an amphibious landing, which could pretty much only happen in the city of Taibei anyway because the rest of the coast is cliffs;
2) Biden’s repeated “gaffes” to the effect that the US would intervene, immediately causing a nuclear stalemate.

I was so excited when I saw there was a post about Yiddish with over 300 comments!

…it is a good job I am also interested in Taiwan 🙂

JWB’s comment on anarchism cum “the need to physically enforce law/morality” brought to mind one of my main reservations about anarchism: the presence of out-and-out criminals and psychopaths in society.

Le Guin addresses this in The Dispossessed. There is no taboo against interpersonal violence as such, and it does happen. Shevet tells Shevek to change his name because he is sick of them being confused: Shevek refuses, at which point Shevet beats him up:

The man named Shevet came up to Shevek one night after supper. He was a stocky, handsome fellow of thirty. “I’m tired of getting mixed up with you,” he said. “Call yourself something else.”

The surly aggressiveness would have puzzled Shevek earlier. Now he simply responded in kind. “Change your own name if you don’t like it,” he said.

“You’re one of those little profiteers who goes to school to keep his hands clean, “the man said. “I’ve always wanted to knock the shit out of one of you.”

“Don’t call me profiteer!” Shevek said, but this wasn’t a verbal battle. Shevet knocked him double. He got in several return blows, having long arms and more temper than his opponent expected: but he was outmatched. Several people paused to watch, saw that it was a fair fight but not an interesting one, and went on. They were neither offended nor attracted by simple violence. Shevek did not call for help, so it was nobody’s business but his own.

That’s the flip-side of anarchist solidarity: if you don’t ask for it, you are left alone. There is an island occupied by murderers, rapists — and therapists. At least that’s the theory:

Bedap’s eyes had got very small, like steel beads. “Brother,” he said, “you are self-righteous. You always were. Look outside your own damned pure conscience for once! I come to you and whisper because I know I can trust you, damn you! Who else can I talk to? Do I want to end up like Tirin?”

“Like Tirin?” Shevek was startled into raising his voice. Bedap hushed him with a gesture towards the wall. “What’s wrong with Tirin? Where is he?”

“In the Asylum on Segvina Island.”

“In the Asylum?”

Bedap hunched his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them, as he sat sideways on the chair. He spoke quietly now, with reluctance.

“Tirin wrote a play and put it on, the year after you left. It was funny—crazy—you know his kind of thing.” Bedap ran a hand through his rough, sandy hair, loosening it from its queue. “It could seem anti-Odonian, if you were stupid. A lot of people are stupid. There was a fuss. He got reprimanded. Public reprimand. I never saw one before. Everybody comes to your syndicate meeting and tells you off. It used to be how they cut a bossy gang foreman or manager down to size. Now they only use it to tell an individual to stop thinking for himself. It was bad. Tirin couldn’t take it. I think it really drove him a bit out of his mind. He felt everybody was against him, after that. He started talking too much—bitter talk. Not irrational, but always critical, always bitter. And he’d talk to anybody that way. Well, he finished at the Institute, qualified as a math instructor, and asked for a posting. He got one. To a road repair crew in Southsetting. He protested it as an error, but the Divlab [Division of Labor] computers repeated it. So he went.”

“Tir never worked outdoors the whole time I knew him,” Shevek interrupted. “Since he was ten. He always wangled desk jobs. Divlab was being fair.”

Bedap paid no attention. “I don’t really know what happened down there. He wrote to me several times, and each time he’d been reposted. Always to physical labor, in little outpost communities. He wrote that he was quitting his posting and coming back to Northsetting to see me. He didn’t come. He stopped writing. I traced him through the Abbenay Labor Files, finally. They sent me a copy of his card, and the last entry was just, ‘Therapy. Segvina Island.’ Therapy! Did Tirin murder somebody? Did he rape somebody? What do you get sent to the Asylum for, beside that?”

“You don’t get sent to the Asylum at all. You request posting to it.”

“Don’t feed me that crap,” Bedap said with sudden rage. “He never asked to be sent there! They drove him crazy and then sent him there. It’s Tirin I’m talking about, Tirin, do you remember him?”

“I knew him before you did. What do you think the Asylum is—a prison? It’s a refuge. If there are murderers and chronic work-quitters there, it’s because they asked to go there, where they’re not under pressure, and safe from retribution. But who are these people you keep talking about—‘they’? ‘They’ drove him crazy, and so on. Are you trying to say that the whole social system is evil, that in fact ‘they,’ Tirin’s persecutors, your enemies, ‘they,’ are us—the social organism?”

“If you can dismiss Tirin from your conscience as a work-quitter, I don’t think I have anything else to say to you,” Bedap replied, sitting hunched up on the chair. There was such plain and simple grief in his voice that Shevek’s righteous wrath was stopped short.

The Anarresti are starting to invent Soviet psychiatry. They need a good shaking-up, which Shevek and his friends do manage to administer at the end of the book. Or at least we think they do: the book ends as it begins, on an ambiguous note. Maybe Shevek and his new friend from offworld get lynched (there have been threats of it): hopefully not. There is only one other Anarresti character in Le Guin’s work, from later in the timeline, and she is a real asshole.