I’m too busy to join my fellow liberal bloggers who are justifiably furious at Disney and ABC for their obscene attempt to air as docudrama an intensely biased mini-series designed to put Clinton in the worst possible light, with scenes that are pure fiction. The only thing I have time to do is refer readers to this excellent post with some photoshopped images that say it all.
This book review is one hell of a read. Sorry for the extended clip, but it’s worth preserving here.
It is thought that Sars originated in the city of Shenzen, in southern China’s Guangdong province. Early on, Greenfeld swoops in on the aptly named Fang Lin, an illegal immigrant to the city from the countryside, who finds a job handling and slaughtering exotic wild animals for restaurants. “Wild flavour”, as it is known, is an important ingredient in China’s new culture of conspicuous consumption. Thanks to lax regulation, the trade in snakes, camels, otters, monkeys, badgers, bats, pangolins, geese, civets, wild boars – anything that can be trapped or hunted – has become a multimillion-dollar industry. Animals are kept in filthy conditions in the backs of restaurant kitchens, where they are butchered only after diners have made their choice. Fang Lin would emerge after a night’s work covered in the blood and excreta of panicked animals, and would chain-smoke to kill the stench.
It is in this overcrowded, pollution-ridden environment that a virus hops over the species barrier, from civet cats to humans. Sars is born. But it has yet to be identified. The disease that emerges is a terrifyingly contagious mystery fever, developing swiftly to a horrific pneumonia, fatal in many cases, and with a high incidence among healthcare staff.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, sensitive and alert after the 1997 outbreak of avian flu, a handful of migratory birds are found dead of the H5N1 influenza. The fear that the new, atypical pneumonia in China, word of which spreads through medical networks, might be the dreaded, mutated avian flu is tested repeatedly, after samples of body effluvia pass perilously and illegally from mainland China to laboratories in Hong Kong. The negative results only add to the rising panic.
The story unfolds like a whodunnit, with a large cast of rogues, victims and heroes. The chief villain is the Chinese government, so secretive and paranoid that it seems it would rather unleash a deadly virus upon the world than be castigated for letting foreigners blame China for it. As one microbiologist comments: “Human lives just aren’t as valuable in China.” But the author reminds us that this ostrich-like attitude is not unique; indeed, it mirrors the Reagan administration’s response to Aids in the 1980s.
We all know how the story unfolded. And while the comparison to Reagan and AIDS has some merit, it has to be remembered that SARS threatened everyone, men, women and children. AIDS was far more selective and more difficult to acquire. When the CCP ignored AIDS, there was barely a whimper from the international community because all of the victims were the disenfranchised – gays, prostitutes, injection drug users and dirt-poor peasants selling their blood for a pittance. SARS posed a danger to everyone, and it still amazes the world that it took so long for China to admit its cover up at the expense of its citizens’ lives.
This is rich. At least one province in China is trying to implement software judges can use to render instant sentencing.
Judges are not usually at risk of losing their jobs to modern technology but that may be changing in China, where new software is handing down sentences automatically. The Zichuan District Court in east China’s Shandong province has installed programs on judges’ computers that provide advice on the proper verdicts in criminal cases, the state-run China Daily reported.
The move appears to be aimed at ensuring standardized decisions and addressing common complaints that China’s judges are ill-trained, corrupt and make arbitrary rulings.
“We aim to establish a regular sentence pattern for criminal trials to avoid different penalties for the same crimes,” said Wang Hongmei, chief judge at the court.
Many judges in China have not received a college education and lack sufficient training in law, although the government has made efforts in recent years to raise the professional standard.
In the Shandong experiment, judges simply enter the relevant details of the crimes plus mitigating circumstances — and the program immediately comes up with an appropriate verdict, according to the paper. But the penalty calculator will not have the final say. Judges will retain the power to hand down their own sentences, depending on circumstances they deem particular to a case.
This is from an email from Brendan (one of the smartest and most talented bloggers out there), who writes,
The Chinese article I found on it actually
makes a bit more sense — it’s a reference for sentencing, rather than verdicts, which WOULD be a useful thing.Still, I can just imagine what a software judge would be like:
“The court will now hear the case of –”
– GUILTY
“I object!”
– VOID
“This is a violation of my constitutional rights!”
– UNRECOGNIZED INPUT: ‘CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS’
“I’m going to appeal this! I’ll take it to Amnesty International!”
– FATAL ERROR
I’m blogrolling him now (his blog was dark for months, but it’s back in full swing now).
Update: Brendan’s own post is here.
I’ve been absent for two days, partly because I’ve been overwhelmed with work, partly because the work pressure led to a crippling insomnia earlier this week, and partly because I was so unhappy with the way our comment threads have gone in recent days.
I almost never delete comments. In the past few days, I’ve even tolerated the comments from “Jessica Copeland,” because for some reason “Jessica” started sounding like a human being. But if I see signs of comment threads being highjacked for stupid personal arguments, I absolutely will not tolerate it. Argue with one another, disagree and point fingers. Whatever. But when someone offers a different point of view and is immediately turned upon as [add your favorite obscenity] the quality of the entire conversation plummets. And that I will not tolerate. I may disagree with Bingfeng, but I also consider him a friend and request we not label him a “shill.” (That’s just one case in point, of many, many cases I saw this past week.) This is not aimed at Pigsun or Ahmet or Ivan or anyone else in particular. it’s aimed at everyone, myself included. We can all be a little kinder and gentler.
The same goes for the Duckpond. Sometimes I don’t even want to look at the posts, they are so nasty. And then everyone emails me and wants me to delete the others’ posts. Before I go in and start deleting at will, I’m going to ask everyone to please be a little (i.e., a lot) more considerate and tolerant. This place will be mighty dull if we only tolerate like-minded commenters. I want to hear alternative viewpoints, I want to see opposing arguments. What I don’t want to see or hear is insults flying at the drop of a hat. I really felt like pulling the plug on the whole thing two days ago. Please: when this community gets into meaningful discussions, it can be really exciting and fun. When it descends into name-calling and slander and obscenities it becomes really offensive.
Sorry if I sound scolding, but enough is enough. Thanks for your understanding.
John Pomfret, on the anniversary of one of society’s most depraved and barbaric social experiments of all time. Pomfret had the unique experience of living and studying in China only a few years after the nightmare ended, and enjoyed a bird’s-eye view into how it affected the lives of its victims and their families (who were, of course, victims as well).
Forty years ago this past August, the first killings were carried out to launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Two educators in Nanjing and a high school principal in Beijing were the first victims of the Red Guards, the shock troops of Mao Zedong’s war against rivals in the Communist Party.
Over the following 10 years, 18 million city kids were dispatched to the countryside to hack out meager existences amid the peasantry. Millions of officials were purged and hundreds of thousands were executed. My college classmate at Nanjing University, Wu Xiaoqing, was the son of the two educators who were murdered in Nanjing; he was 11 when his parents died. When we studied together he had the nickname “Old Wu” because he seemed old before his time.
Today China’s juggernaut economy, freewheeling night life and sophisticated diplomacy make it seem a world away from the Communist Party-imposed madness of the 1960s. Wu’s life is an example. He’s a university professor, a published author and the father of a young woman who is preparing for college in Australia. No other country seems to have been so adept at avoiding the pitfalls — and erasing the memory — of its past.
Pomfret goes on to describe the horrors his friend Wu endured during the CR, including seeing his parents beaten to death, and how the experience affects him to this day. Pomfret’s closing observations reaffirm for me the difference between great reporters like himself, Joseph Kahn, Philip Pan, etc., who dare hold up a mirror to the faces of their hosts, and mediocre reporters who, brilliant and charming though they may be, bend over backwards to find excuses and deflect all criticisms with a fanciful trick (“yeah, but in America…”).
He did not march during the 1989 student protests that ended in the Tiananmen Square crackdown. And after the crackdown he was put at the head of a committee investigating professors in the history department of his university. In recent years, Wu was assigned to write a chapter in a high school history textbook about the Cultural Revolution. He tried to slip in some details about the horrors of the time, including a subtle critique of the systemic nature of the problem. But it was excised by a censor’s knife.
Wu is aware of the Faustian bargain he’s made to live — and live well — in the People’s Republic of China. It’s a bargain that millions of people like him in China’s growing middle class have made. They inhabit a system that many despise, but it’s also a system they believe they can’t live without. The cost of moving forward is forgetting the past, Old Wu would say, including the dream of bringing to justice the people who killed your parents.
China wants the 21st century to become the Chinese century, yet history has a way of sneaking up on countries, just as it does on people. The late Chinese writer Ba Jin lobbied hard in the last years of his life for a museum to commemorate the victims of the Cultural Revolution; it was never built. I asked Wu what he thought about such a museum. Forty years after the Cultural Revolution, he said, “China isn’t ready for it.”
It’s odd, that in so many other societies that committed sins against its own people and others, the way to move forward has been to acknowledge and examine the past, not to hide from it and thereby deny it. America’s support of slavery is the subject of countless books and plays and movies, as well as museums. We have Holocaust museums and Vietnam memorials and museums and numerous Native American museums and Cambodia has a Khmer Rouge museum…. Is China’s erasure of the CR and the self-imposed code of silent acceptance a healthy thing, or will its silence come back to haunt them? What does Pomfret mean when he writes that “history has a way of sneaking up on countries, just as it does on people”? And does his clear implication – that China’s history will hold it back from attaining the “China Century” for which it longs – have any grounding in reality? Serious questions for which any insights will be appreciated.
Update: I suddenly remembered that over a year ago I did write a post about a “Cultural Revolution museum” in China. Read the old post to see why it’s not a very serious effort.
This is grim. As we continue to spread liberty and freedom (or at least to spread the meme about it) the actual scene on the ground is pretty scary. From liberated, free Afghanistan.
It began last summer.
On a July morning, Taliban gunmen shot dead the province’s most powerful cleric as he walked to the main city mosque to lead morning prayers. Five months later, they executed a teacher at a nearby village school as students watched. The following month, they walked into another mosque and gunned down an Afghan engineer working for a foreign aid group, shooting him in the back as he pressed his forehead to the ground and supplicated to God.
This spring and summer, the slow and methodical siege of this southern provincial capital intensified. The Taliban and their allies set up road checkpoints, burned 20 trucks and slowed the flow of supplies to reconstruction projects. All told, in surrounding Helmand Province, five teachers, one judge and scores of police officers have been killed. Dozens of schools and courts have been shuttered, according to Afghan officials.
‘Our government is weak,’ said Fowzea Olomi, a local women’s rights advocate whose driver was shot dead in May and who fears she is next. ‘Anarchy has come.’
When the Taliban fell nearly five years ago, Lashkar Gah seemed like fertile ground for the United States-led effort to stabilize the country. For 30 years during the cold war, Americans carried out the largest development project in Afghanistan’s history here, building a modern capital with suburban-style tract homes, a giant hydroelectric dam and 300 miles of canals that made 250,000 acres of desert bloom. Afghans called this city ‘Little America.’
Today, Little America is the epicenter of a Taliban resurgence and an explosion in drug cultivation that has claimed the lives of 106 American and NATO soldiers this year and doubled American casualty rates countrywide. Across Afghanistan, roadside bomb attacks are up by 30 percent; suicide bombings have doubled. Statistically it is now nearly as dangerous to serve as an American soldier in Afghanistan as it is in Iraq.
This is a long, intesne historical article that looks at the ups and downs the Afghan people have endured since the 1960s. The fall of the Taliban in 2001 was definitely an “up” time, and their hopes soared. What a pity that we couldn’t commit the resources to enforce our victory and keep the Taliban on the run. It’s far too simplistic to say that the reason was our distraction in Iraq. As this article makes clear, there were many factors, such as the backwardness of many of the people, the absolute worthlessness of the nation’s “army” and the rampant rise of corruption. Our failure in both Afghanistan and Iraq resuilted from a dismal lack of understanding of the culture of those we liberated, and a uniquely American belief that simply by implementing elections and drafting constitutions we’d have democracy and freedom. Sort of like Democracy in a Can – just add water and stir.
Remember all that hope after the Taliban’s fall, when women removed their burkas and it seemed Afghanistan was a true example of our ability to liberate the world’s oppressed? Would that it could have been so simple. What we have now is such a tragedy, one has to wonder if it was ever worth it.
I see stories like this and I feel sick. Some US television stations may drop the incredibly moving film 9/11, made by two French film makers who were following a rookie fiefighter around NYC on that fateful day, because some of the firemen use four-letter words. I’ll never forget watching that video as the too-low-flying plane roars overhead and the videographer tilts up his camera and catches it seconds before it crashes into the North Tower, bringing death into this world and all our woes. At that instant one of the firefighters screams, “Holy shit!” I think he said it several times. It was so raw and painful, these confused men watching as life as we know it disintegrates in front of their eyes., and they realize they may die on this day Damn straight, Holy Shit. And yet the fucking squeamish Bush fundamentalist FCC is meting out fines to television stations in response to complaints with viewers, fearful of having their genteel sensibilities offended by a naughty word. So some stations are refusing to air 9/11. I loved America, before we became so fucking obsessed with the petty, the stupid, the irrelevant. That we could deprive the people of great art (and the movie is a work of art) for this, for Holy Shit… It makes me sick for America, and it makes me long more than ever for change. How is it that we allowed the Bush regime to put a plastic bag over our head, resulting in the brain death of a great nation? Fuck it. I have no reason to go home anytime soon, certainly not to a country that is so caught up in moral nicities that it censors and bans beautiful things. Fuck it. Fuck it.
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