COLLECTIVE INSANITY

On Sat, 23 Dec 2006 09:20:59 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Jonathan wrote:

China, as the largest and most repressive govt
the world has ever seen,

Stalin's Russia makes China look like a kid's summer camp.
North Korea makes China's government look like a kid's amusement park
with unlimited free rides and ice cream.
In fact, most of the world's governments prior to around the year 1200
look pretty awful in comparison to China today.

Indeed. Has this guy Jonathan ever _been_ to China? Anyone who's
visited Shanghai in the past ten years is probably wondering what
alternate reality he's from.

qualifies as the most
brittle and sensitive system possible.

Actually, it's survived this long by being far more flexible than
other Communist dictatorships. Ever since they booted out the Gang of
Four in 1976, they've been looking for ways to adjust to the reality
that Communism doesn't work.

A popular uprising is what the protesters at Tiananmen Square were
hoping for; by forcing the government to use violence against its own
people, such outrage would be generated in the inhabitants of the rural
areas that they would march on Beijing, overthrow the government, and
set up a democracy.
The first part of their plan worked just great. :-)

They missed the little detail that most people don't care very much
about democracy, they care about being safe and warm and fed. China
has enough to eat and no one's invading it, so right there the present
government's already outperforming most previous Chinese regimes.

As soon as the Chinese Civil War is over, and all the millions of dead
from violence and starvation are buried.

And the Chinese would have no illusions about that, since they've had
at least three civil wars in the past two centuries that produced
exactly that.

So how do you build a conspiracy they believe might
succeed? You first find what frightens the CCP
the most.

Losing their WalMart contracts.

Oh, I think there might be other contracts even more important than
Wal-Mart -- like their oil deals.

And build it from that. They fear the
hundred million strong religious movement
knows as the Falun Gong the most. They
have gone to extreme, even for them, measures
to ban the movement. Going so far as to actually
create an entire govt ministry, like an interior dept
to silence them.

Because they remember what happened in the Taiping Rebellion, and the
Boxer Rebellion, which were both started by groups rather like Falun
Gong...





--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
The second issue of Helix is at http://www.helixsf.com
A new Ethshar novel is being serialized at http://www.ethshar.com/thevondishambassador1.html

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:


Actually, it's survived this long by being far more flexible than
other Communist dictatorships. Ever since they booted out the Gang of
Four in 1976, they've been looking for ways to adjust to the reality
that Communism doesn't work.



I think our society is a far more fragile thing than China's at the
moment. China is still primitive and agrarian enough outside the major
cities that it could survive major political upheaval and still be
fairly self-sufficent; there are whole provinces over there that still
don't have electricity.



A popular uprising is what the protesters at Tiananmen Square were
hoping for; by forcing the government to use violence against its own
people, such outrage would be generated in the inhabitants of the rural
areas that they would march on Beijing, overthrow the government, and
set up a democracy.
The first part of their plan worked just great. :-)



They missed the little detail that most people don't care very much
about democracy, they care about being safe and warm and fed. China
has enough to eat and no one's invading it, so right there the present
government's already outperforming most previous Chinese regimes.



It's had it ups and downs over the past few thousand years, but overall
it's been a pretty successful civilization in at least getting a bare
minimal amount for its people to survive. The fact that it's still
around and as populous as it is says a lot for it.



As soon as the Chinese Civil War is over, and all the millions of dead


from violence and starvation are buried.

And the Chinese would have no illusions about that, since they've had
at least three civil wars in the past two centuries that produced
exactly that.



The Cultural Revolution was probably the first major nail in Chinese
Marxism's coffin.
I still snicker every time I think of that new Chinese government
propaganda slogan from a couple of years back: "To Be Rich Is Glorious!"
Like Peronism, Chinese communism can be seven different things on the
seven days of the week.

Because they remember what happened in the Taiping Rebellion, and the
Boxer Rebellion, which were both started by groups rather like Falun
Gong...



They probably noted the trouble Japan had with Aum Shinrikyo, and
figured they should nip the problem in the bud. Also the symbol of Falun
Gong is somewhat familiar looking:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...0px-Falun8.gif
;-)

Pat

On Sat, 23 Dec 2006 12:13:18 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

Actually, it's survived this long by being far more flexible than
other Communist dictatorships. Ever since they booted out the Gang of
Four in 1976, they've been looking for ways to adjust to the reality
that Communism doesn't work.

I think our society is a far more fragile thing than China's at the
moment. China is still primitive and agrarian enough outside the major
cities that it could survive major political upheaval and still be
fairly self-sufficent; there are whole provinces over there that still
don't have electricity.

"Whole provinces"? Seems unlikely, but there are certainly large
areas that don't.

We traveled through some northern areas where they've basically turned
entire hillsides into giant greenhouses, so they can grow crops
despite the climate; it's impressive.

The streets of Shanghai are awash in good cheap food; China's doing
well right now.

They missed the little detail that most people don't care very much
about democracy, they care about being safe and warm and fed. China
has enough to eat and no one's invading it, so right there the present
government's already outperforming most previous Chinese regimes.

It's had it ups and downs over the past few thousand years, but overall
it's been a pretty successful civilization in at least getting a bare
minimal amount for its people to survive. The fact that it's still
around and as populous as it is says a lot for it.

It's been a very successful civilization for 4,000 years, but it's
also had a heck of a lot of famines and invasions. There's a reason
the Chinese have recipes for bird's nest soup and other stuff nobody
else ever tried to eat.

(And yes, I know bird's nest soup is good, but really, who'd have
_tried_ it if they had a choice?)

As soon as the Chinese Civil War is over, and all the millions of dead
from violence and starvation are buried.

And the Chinese would have no illusions about that, since they've had
at least three civil wars in the past two centuries that produced
exactly that.

The Cultural Revolution was probably the first major nail in Chinese
Marxism's coffin.

I was sort of counting that as a civil war when I said "at least."

I still snicker every time I think of that new Chinese government
propaganda slogan from a couple of years back: "To Be Rich Is Glorious!"
Like Peronism, Chinese communism can be seven different things on the
seven days of the week.

The Chinese have gotten pretty good at propaganda; they're long past
what they did under Mao, or anything the Soviets ever produced.
There's this giant video screen at the corner of Nanjing Donglu and
Fujian Zhonglu in Shanghai that plays propaganda films, and they're
really quite lovely and uplifting. We watched one there (with English
subtitles) called "A Healthy City is A Happy Song," calling on
citizens to take care of their health and keep the city clean, that
was better than at least 90% of American advertising, and sustained it
for several minutes, not just ninety seconds.

Because they remember what happened in the Taiping Rebellion, and the
Boxer Rebellion, which were both started by groups rather like Falun
Gong...

They probably noted the trouble Japan had with Aum Shinrikyo, and
figured they should nip the problem in the bud. Also the symbol of Falun
Gong is somewhat familiar looking:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...0px-Falun8.gif
;-)

Charming.

Of course, that plays rather differently in Asia than in Europe or
America.



--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
The second issue of Helix is at http://www.helixsf.com
A new Ethshar novel is being serialized at http://www.ethshar.com/thevondishambassador1.html

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

"Whole provinces"? Seems unlikely, but there are certainly large
areas that don't.


No, there are three without electricity of centralized sort IRRC.
I found out about this a year or so back while doing research on solar
power, and it completely threw me.
I'll see if I can get a citation on it, as well as the names of the
provinces.
China has a serious electrical power shortage, and is looking into all
sorts of alternative energy sources so that people in rural areas can at
least get some electrical power via wind or solar generation of it, if
even in only a mini-grid around a rural village.
At the moment their electricity is primarily coming from coal-fired
plants and they are having a very hard time getting sufficient coal to
operate them, so that power rationing has been imposed in many areas.
Draught and floods screw up their hydroelectric power generation ability.
electrical power capacity i considered the single greatest problem they
face in their continued economic development.

We traveled through some northern areas where they've basically turned
entire hillsides into giant greenhouses, so they can grow crops
despite the climate; it's impressive.

The streets of Shanghai are awash in good cheap food; China's doing
well right now.


Very funny story from a long time back I once read.
Back in the early days of the computer revolution, some of the those
whacko nerds who would later be immortalized as the fathers of the PC
were very fond of a Chinese restaurant near their campus (Berkeley? MIT?
I'm trying to remember) anyway, the town had a significant
Chinese-American population, and the had a separate menu written in
Chinese for those patrons.
After eating there many times, the computer whizzes noticed something
odd; they had ordered everything on the English language menu, and yet
the Chinese American patrons had dishes they had never seen being
brought to them.
So, after a few subtle questions were directed at the management and
received evasive replies, they did what any good nerds would do. They
decided to learn how to read Chinese and get their hands on one of the
Chinese menus.
This took a while, but by trial and error, they were able to get a
smattering of the language, and started cross-referencing the things on
the English language menu to things on the much more involved Chinese
language menu.
And they noticed something... all the entries that were on the English
menu had the same ideogram in their names on the Chinese menu... so what
did the ideogram mean in Chinese?...they found out.
The ideogram meant "barbarian".
Would you like your shrimp and almonds on rice the way they make it in
China...or the way we serve it to the white-skinned barbarians over at
table six, who have appalling tastes and no real understanding of a
cuisine that goes back thousands of years?
Once they had determined what was going on, they went back to the
restaurant and started ordering things in Chinese off the Chinese menu.
At first the staff was flabbergasted at what they were doing...I mean,
seriously, what would the barbarians want with quality food like that?
Wouldn't they just like some egg foo young or maybe a little chicken
chow mein with half a bottle of soy sauce on it?
The end result was that they soon found out what _real_ Chinese cooking
tastes like - a complete wonder of tastes from ingredients and spices
they'd never heard of, properly prepared in the same ways that they were
when they graced Kublai Khan's table...and that they were soon
completely enthralled by. :-)


It's been a very successful civilization for 4,000 years, but it's
also had a heck of a lot of famines and invasions. There's a reason
the Chinese have recipes for bird's nest soup and other stuff nobody
else ever tried to eat.

(And yes, I know bird's nest soup is good, but really, who'd have
_tried_ it if they had a choice?)



You just consider the first guy who ever thought draping a cured calve's
skin over his body and sneaking up on a live cow's udder was a clever
idea. After that, eating solidified swallow spit and hundred year old
bird eggs seems almost rational, and a lot less likely to get you killed
by having your head stomped on by an enraged bovine's hoof. God knows
what trying the same stunt with a goat was like, but I think a lot of
people met their end in the first tries at that little experiment also,
probably by being butted off cliffs and what-not. :-)

Pat

On Sat, 23 Dec 2006 15:06:38 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

"Whole provinces"? Seems unlikely, but there are certainly large
areas that don't.

No, there are three without electricity of centralized sort IRRC.
I found out about this a year or so back while doing research on solar
power, and it completely threw me.
I'll see if I can get a citation on it, as well as the names of the
provinces.

I'd appreciate that; thanks.

(By the way, I don't know where you are, but I'm reading this in
rec.arts.sf.written.)

China has a serious electrical power shortage, and is looking into all
sorts of alternative energy sources so that people in rural areas can at
least get some electrical power via wind or solar generation of it, if
even in only a mini-grid around a rural village.

Yeah, I knew that part.

And they noticed something... all the entries that were on the English
menu had the same ideogram in their names on the Chinese menu... so what
did the ideogram mean in Chinese?...they found out.
The ideogram meant "barbarian".

Well... if it was a single character, it just meant "foreigner."
"Barbarian" takes two.

Not that there's much of a distinction in Chinese.

The end result was that they soon found out what _real_ Chinese cooking
tastes like - a complete wonder of tastes from ingredients and spices
they'd never heard of, properly prepared in the same ways that they were
when they graced Kublai Khan's table...and that they were soon
completely enthralled by. :-)

There are dozens of different Chinese cuisines, and the stuff you get
in Chinese restaurants here varies hugely in authenticity. I live in
an area with a lot of Chinese immigrants, so the local restaurants
have food that's both better and more authentic than I've eaten in
most other parts of the U.S. When we ate at a Chinese restaurant in
Des Moines -- well, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't remotely like what
you'd get in China.

We found some amazing stuff to eat in China -- and some other foods we
couldn't choke down. We also discovered that the same name can mean
drastically different things from different cooks, and that the
Chinese name often doesn't really tell you what you're getting.

The Chinese name is often really vague, in fact. Like the dishes that
have the character for "meat" without specifying what kind. About 80%
of the time that means pork, but it could also be mutton, or dog, or
things you'd rather not know about.




--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
The second issue of Helix is at http://www.helixsf.com
A new Ethshar novel is being serialized at http://www.ethshar.com/thevondishambassador1.html

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

I'd appreciate that; thanks.




It didn't sound right to me either, but China is a fairly strange
country, so who knows?
See if you can figure out what this Chinese thing is; it's in Google
Maps, so enter the coordinates and zoom in on at the satellite view;
it's one of the strangest things I've ever seen:

N 43.074, E 92.810

An airport runway with artistic designs on it? And what are all the figure 8s about?

Then there's these oddities, which are written on the ground in huge characters:

N 42.654951, E 94.165455

N 42.659417, E 94.266574

N 42.542491, E 94.325827

N 42.453399, E 94.146470
We've been puzzling over these on sci.space.history



(By the way, I don't know where you are, but I'm reading this in
rec.arts.sf.written.)



sci.space.history and .policy


Well... if it was a single character, it just meant "foreigner."
"Barbarian" takes two.

Not that there's much of a distinction in Chinese.


You're up on this, aren't you?
What does "Yankee Running-Dog Air Pirate Lackey of the Historically
Doomed Hegamonist Paper Tiger West" look like? ;-)




The end result was that they soon found out what _real_ Chinese cooking
tastes like - a complete wonder of tastes from ingredients and spices
they'd never heard of, properly prepared in the same ways that they were
when they graced Kublai Khan's table...and that they were soon
completely enthralled by. :-)



There are dozens of different Chinese cuisines, and the stuff you get
in Chinese restaurants here varies hugely in authenticity. I live in
an area with a lot of Chinese immigrants, so the local restaurants
have food that's both better and more authentic than I've eaten in
most other parts of the U.S. When we ate at a Chinese restaurant in
Des Moines -- well, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't remotely like what
you'd get in China.



Salt Lake City is supposed to be pretty good in this respect for some
reason.
I did eat at a Chinese resturant there; the food was okay, and the
prices outstanding... all you could eat for $5.00, but that was a long,
long, time ago.
It's a pity that when I visited San Francisco I didn't eat at one of the
Chinese restaurants; I'd imagine they'd have some superb ones, and I'm
nuts about Chinese food. But being from North Dakota, I headed straight
for Fisherman's Wharf.

We found some amazing stuff to eat in China -- and some other foods we
couldn't choke down. We also discovered that the same name can mean
drastically different things from different cooks, and that the
Chinese name often doesn't really tell you what you're getting.

The Chinese name is often really vague, in fact. Like the dishes that
have the character for "meat" without specifying what kind. About 80%
of the time that means pork, but it could also be mutton, or dog, or
things you'd rather not know about.



Ah, the North Korean definition of "meat": Something or someone that was
once alive. ;-)

Pat

In article ,
Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
The ideogram meant "barbarian".

Well... if it was a single character, it just meant "foreigner."
"Barbarian" takes two.
Not that there's much of a distinction in Chinese.

Or most other places, if you go back not very far. "Barbarian" is from a
Greek word (via Latin) which meant either "foreign" or "ignorant", and
covered anyone who didn't speak Greek. (It's thought to have originated
as a mocking reference to foreign languages all sounding like "bar-bar"
to Greeks.)
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...
China has a serious electrical power shortage, and is looking into all
sorts of alternative energy sources so that people in rural areas can at
least get some electrical power via wind or solar generation of it, if
even in only a mini-grid around a rural village.

To a much lesser extent, that's also a problem in many areas here in the US.
In my preferred part of New Mexico, the primary thing holding back
development is the lack of electrical infrastructure. Lots of folks think
it's a lack of water, but while you can truck in a bucket of water, you
can't truck in a bucket of electricity. When I look for property in that
area, the first think I look for are electrical lines.

Mind you, I don't think this is a problem for me- it means fewer competitors
for the good lots The key is not to buy lots with access to electricity
(which cost a lot more), it's to pay attention to growth and buy lots that
will get it within the next few years. I've investigated wind turbines and
solar power for the next house I build. At least finding a clear path to the
satellite providing my internet service won't be a problem

On Sat, 23 Dec 2006 23:03:46 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Henry Spencer) made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

In article ,
Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
The ideogram meant "barbarian".

Well... if it was a single character, it just meant "foreigner."
"Barbarian" takes two.
Not that there's much of a distinction in Chinese.

Or most other places, if you go back not very far. "Barbarian" is from a
Greek word (via Latin) which meant either "foreign" or "ignorant", and
covered anyone who didn't speak Greek. (It's thought to have originated
as a mocking reference to foreign languages all sounding like "bar-bar"
to Greeks.)

Ummmm....no. Or not necessarily. There is a lot of disagreement
among etymologists on this. I was taught in Latin class that the
derivation was from the word for "beard" (because the Romans shaved.
Many still hew to this belief.

But since there's disagreement (and it's not space related), I won't
ask for a (third) tee shirt.

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article ,
Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
The ideogram meant "barbarian".

Well... if it was a single character, it just meant "foreigner."
"Barbarian" takes two.
Not that there's much of a distinction in Chinese.

Or most other places, if you go back not very far. "Barbarian" is
from a Greek word (via Latin) which meant either "foreign" or
"ignorant", and covered anyone who didn't speak Greek. (It's thought
to have originated as a mocking reference to foreign languages all
sounding like "bar-bar" to Greeks.)

"Goy" comes from the Hebrew word for "nation" (meaning all the *other*
nations of the world), and while it's not really an insult, it's very far
from being a compliment.