Monthly Archives: January 2010
Scott Brown is America’s New Superman
In a shocking victory, Republican Scott Brown was fortunately the candidate to replace the Democratic 46 year veteran, Teddy Kennedy, for the Massachusetts Congressional Senate seat. Given that Brown’s opponent was Martha Coakley, a Democrat who held the prestigious position of Massachusetts Attorney General, he really should have lost. Though some might disagree, Coakley was probably better suited for the Senate seat because of her laudable background. However, this particular election was not just a regular Senatorial election, but rather the election that decided the fate of the monstrous healthcare bill in Congress.
First, Scott Brown really only ran on one platform: to shut down the year long discussion on healthcare legislation. According to the Senator’s website, Brown writes, “I believe that all Americans deserve health care coverage, but I am opposed to the health care legislation that is under consideration in Congress and will vote against it. It will raise taxes, increase government spending and lower the quality of care, especially for elders on Medicare. I suppo Continue reading
Political Language
George Orwell once wrote that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”[1].i Sixty years later, political prose is as insidious as ever, with 80% of Americans kept politically illiterate mostly due to the propaganda of Fox News and the disinterest stemming from our thoroughly inept leaders [2]. For a civil society to prosper, its citizenry must master political language in order to have meaningful debate with clearly understood words. Instead, the trend of our century has been the devolution of the English language. With this comes an inability to properly understand the world around us. As Kung-tzu (Confucius) once said, “If names are not correct and do not match realities, language has no object. If language has no object, action becomes impossible — and therefore all human affairs disintegrate” [3].Instead of continuing this meandering tirade, it is best to point out a few minor instances of inaccuracies in political language. The first is the lack of distinction between a government and its people. In the years following the US invasion of Iraq, anti-American sentiment rose to new heights, with its descent occurring only recently. Surprisingly, Europeans hold the same misunderstanding of Americans, as Americans have about foreigners. Chiefly, Europeans make the simple mistake of assuming the policies of a democratic government is aligned with the general opinion of its people(!) However similar to American views, Americans take it a step further into absurdity by assuming the same of countries ruled by authoritarian regime. Last year, after months of Republican demonization of Iran, they were blind-sided by the pro-democracy, modern, progressive, college student uprising following the Continue reading
Kinda Late to Help Haiti
As everyone now knows, on January 12th Haiti had been struck by a devastating earthquake that killed thousands of people. According to the United States Agency for International Development, the estimated death toll is 100,000, and nearly 3 million people have been affected. Clearly, this is a terrible tragedy.
So, what was the U.S. response to this catastrophe? Surprisingly, America had a better response time to supporting Haiti than it did its own city of New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Within a day, the U.S. sent over American soldiers, firefighters, paramedics, and humanitarian workers. In fact, President Barack Obama promised Haiti $100 million in hard earned taxpayer dollars, and has stated that much more aid is on the way. Continue reading
I Love the Game Google is Playing
The New York Times reported that Google plans to shut down all operations in China due to assaults from hackers, as well as, China’s attempts to limit free speech online [1]. Although this makes Google sound heroic, it hardly sounds like the truth in its totality. Google is a multinational corporation that has to cater to shareholders, so financial straits are most likely the real reason for the anticipated departure.Google has been cooperating with the Chinese government’s demands for internet censorship for years. In fact, Phillip Lenssen’s blog, blogoscoped, provides some shocking screenshots of how the censorship materializes itself on Google’s China based search engine [2]. After viewing Lenssen’s blog post, it is clear that search engine censorship is probably the least important reason why Google is planning to leave China. With over 1.3 billion people to capitalize off of, there is no reason why human rights trump the prospect of profit. Continue reading
Misconceptions: A Vital Component of Historical US-China Relations
Misunderstandings between individuals are some of the greatest sources of conflict that can enter a relationship. Friendships have ended because one person thought that the other meant something else; marriages have broken because of misconceptions about the other partner’s intentions or actions. This holds true not only for individual relationships, but relationships between different cultures and nations as well. Such things become clearer when one views relationships between nations already in conflict, such as the United States and China. To examine this relationship, we must look at a misconception that arose as a result of legitimate worry and anger, concerning American imperialism.
The idea that the US is still an imperialistic power tainted the Chinese perspective of American actions during the mid- to late twentieth century, despite the fact that American expansionism ended decades before. Just as important, American fear of Soviet communism during the mid-twentieth century resulted in the refusal to accept a Communist China as a sovereign state, viewing the People’s Republic of China as a pawn of the Soviet Union and thereby refusing to work with them. Avoiding these two misconceptions and focusing on cultural similarities and understanding, as has become a focus in more recent years, has improved relations between the two nations immensely. Continue reading
China Plays Dominoes Well
History is marked by a series of conflicts – kinetic and potential; Chinese activities in Central Asia are exemplary of this. On December 14, 2009, Turkmenistan began its exportation of 40 billion cubic meters (bcm hereafter) of natural gas to the Chinese Xinjiang Province, with contributions of 10 bcm from both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan over 30 years. Historically, Turkmenistan has exported gas through Russia en route to China yet this particular deal conveniently bypasses Russia. To complicate matters more, the European Union shares an interest in this region vis-à-vis their Nabucco gas line planned to run through southern Europe into Turkey. Needless to say that while much commotion is made over oil and gas bonanzas in the Middle East these days, nations like Turkmenistan and other central Asian countries have untapped oil and gas reserves and naturally stand as open targets as both potential trading partners and secondary allies for nations such as China, whose intentions are altogether unknown. As such, the benevolent guise of trade very easily becomes the hook by which nations such as China are able to rally seemingly insignificant states to their side. In essence, while the powerful nations of today are playing hard politics in the Middle East, China is playing soft politics in Central Asia as a precursor to the domino effect in that region with Turkmenistan as the battlefield for trading rights.
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