Category: Politics (explicit)

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Move Along. No Internet To See Here

To me, the most fascinating aspect of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre is that China’s government has blocked a number of western websites and services — Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more — to keep its people from reading anything about the historical event.

Can the absence of something speak more loudly than the thing itself? It sounds like something out of a Samuel Delany novel, in which the  very language of protest is subtly excised from a people.

One problem with wiping out history like this is that subsequent generations have so little idea of what happened that they inadvertently let the truth out simply because they don’t even know something was suppressed, as happened on the 18th anniversary.

I also wonder how “the people” will interpret the week-long shuttering of their favorite social networking sites “for maintenance”. If this becomes an annual occurrence, will the week of June 4 eventually become known in China as Dark Internet Week? Will they start to develop conspiracy theories as to why this keeps happening? Will they infer motivations more sinister than the Tiananmen Square Massacre itself?

Anyway Here’s a neat New York Times piece on That Guy Who Stood In Front Of The Line Of Tanks, which still ranks as the greatest f*** you moment ever caught on film.

And here’s a post about the anniversary in Beijing from James Fallows, the Atlantic’s correspondent in China. You can go check out his excellent blog for a bunch of posts about how arbitrary China’s media censorship has been this week.

(UPDATE! Maybe the original Tiananmen Square Protests were meant as an anniversary celebration for ten-cent beer night.)

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What’s the worst that could happen?

Bob: Our big biotech industry conference always attracts waves of moonbat-crazy protesters. Remember that time in San Francisco when they wore riot gear, dived under the buses that were carrying attendees to the convention center, and screamed at attendees with bullhorns?

Irv: Sure! And what about the time the policeman had a fatal heart attack during protests in Philadelphia? That was terrible! I hope nothing like that happens again!

Oscar: Hey, guys! I just invited Karl Rove to speak on a panel at this year’s conference!

(I’m thinking of making this an occasional series, too. Maybe enough wrong-ass stuff will crop up every week that I can justify making it my Thursday post. My big decision: do I keep it as “What’s the worst that could happen?” or relaunch it as “I see nothing that could go wrong with this plan!”)

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The Book of, uh, something and something else

I was too darn busy this weekend to write about that final Montaigne essay, and this week’s going to be pretty rough at the office, but I don’t want to leave you guys in the literary lurch. So here’s the closing passage from Philip Roth’s 1980 interview with Milan Kundera.

It’s not that I’ve been poring over Kundera lately, or contemplating this interview. Rather, an acquaintance sent out a request for someone to dig this interview up and provide him with the passage for something he’s writing. It initially ran at the end of Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but Roth included it in his Shop Talk collection of interviews & essays. I typed it up for him, then decided to share it with you:

Roth: Is this [novel], then, the furthest point you have reached in your pessimism?

Kundera: I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don’t know whether my nation will perish and I don’t know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian novel, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

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FUAE (or FUBAI)

I know it’s gotta burn my mom’s ass that there’s a big “Fly Emirates” logo on the jersey of her favorite FC, but she’s gotta be happy that the UAE has caved and will now allow Andy Ram, an Israeli doubles-tennis player, to participate in an ATP tournament in Dubai.

Weirdly, the ESPN article (derived from Reuters & AP) treats the ban on Israelis as though it’s a UAE response to the fighting in Gaza, and not, y’know, long-standing official policy. (Allegedly, they’ve been loosening up a little, partly in response to Dubai’s growth in the diamond trade).

But keeping the surreal quotient high:

On Wednesday, Swedish authorities said that Sweden and Israel will play their first-round Davis Cup tennis match in an empty arena next month because of security concerns.

Anyway, I still won’t do PR for Malaysia.

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What’s the worst that could happen?

Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear bomb expert who sold secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is a free man!

Khan said he was finished with his nuclear work and wanted to devote his time to education. He said he had no plan to travel abroad apart from Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, for a Muslim pilgrimage.

I see nothing that could go wrong with that plan!