I’m generally pretty tolerant of gaffes from all groups of people. Most people tend to have moments when they didn’t think about what they were saying.
But I do take notice of gaffes, because it usually lets loose people’s deep biases that they don’t normally display.
So the latest media gaffe in US that caught my attention, was when a kid made a suggestion to “kill everyone in China” to settle U.S. debt, on Jimmy Kimmel’s show.
For one, I’m not the only one who was offended.
http://www.today.com/entertainment/jimmy-kimmel-skit-sparks-protest-after-child-suggests-kill-everyone-8C11487721
Read more…
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/world/asia/beijing-restricts-coverage-after-car-explodes-at-forbidden-city.html?_r=0
As for purpose, terrorism, like politics, is all about symbolism.
As symbolism goes, I can be shocked by the attacks of planes used as flying bombs ramming into skyscrapers, but I can also understand the logic of its symbolism. If you are a desperate terrorist waging war on US, you might attack the biggest symbols of US, the landmarks of Capitalism and Democracy.
Read more…
Recently, wading knee deep into the piles of Expat China Blog articles with typical anti-China titles, I came across this rather ridiculous one:
http://foarp.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-insanity-at-heart-of-chinese.html, regarding a “insane plan for conquering most of Asia published as an editorial in the Chinese Communist Party’s Hong Kong-based media outlet Wen Wei Po”.
It is worth noting the kind of typical behavior of shallow smear journalism and base intellectual dishonesty in many typical Expat Blogs.
Read more…
Two weeks back, Russia Today broke a story with the title “China employs 2 million analysts to monitor web activity.” From that, we get a plethora of dark articles about how bad the Chinese government is. For example, from the BBC, we get an article titled “China employs two million microblog monitors state media say“:
More than two million people in China are employed by the government to monitor web activity, state media say, providing a rare glimpse into how the state tries to control the internet.
…
China’s hundreds of millions of web users increasingly use microblogs to criticise the state or vent anger.
Recent research suggested Chinese censors actively target social media. Read more…
Categories: News, Opinion, Philosophy, politics Tags: censorship, chinese censorship, democracy, freedom of speech, internet, Internet censorship, meritocratic democracy, social media
Orwell warned the World that when propaganda is truly successfully ingrained into society, people would not even realize propaganda for what it is. They would think it is normal and ordinary. When people read Orwell’s “1984”, it was clear from our own perspectives what propaganda was, in the “Newspeak” of the story. But we do not necessarily understand how such propaganda could be perceived as normal. It felt like even the people in the story should know that the propagandas were lies, and that they should object and resist.
But that is not the case. And we have a perfect illustration of it for today’s example: The US government “shutdown”. Ask the hypothetical: What would Orwell think of it?
Read more…
I wanted to share a video that has gone viral on Youku, and has gotten the attention of western outlets such as Time Magazine, which will no doubt attract ample amounts of sneers and visceral comments from the West. I’m posting both the English (Youtube) and Chinese (Youku) versions, for everyone’s convenience.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BosGD5Bk98
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNjIzMTk1NTQ4.html
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