DAD: Kids, what do you want to have for dinner?Sometimes it's The Tim Burton Home Movie:
TEENAGER 1: [flat voice] Nothing.
TEENAGER 2: [Bored] I don't care.
DAD: Where have you two been for the last hour?Fortunately they sleep at least part of the day, else all my remaining hair would have fallen out long ago. Speaking of fallout, who is being nuked on the blogs today? It's the first cross strait flights under the new Administration -- on US independence day. Probably just a coincidence.
SEBASTIAN: We went to California!
SHERIDAN: Yeah! And Sebastian got two girls pregnant!
SPECIAL: Fili has created a Taiwan blog map. Add yours, and meet the bloggers in your area. There's an internship opportunity at DPP HQ.Geof lambastes media exaggeration. J-hole over at Ni Howdy reviews the media on the cross-strait flights, with no little irony. B@Taiwan has some fun with it too. Taiwanese Heart relates WHO and our current enterovirus outbreak. A-gu lauds an excellent comment by Scott Sommers on my website. And rips CNN for innaccuracies. Steven Crook, local reporter, with a good article on foreigners in the tourist game. Jerome Ma's doubletalk and the KMT reviving the blacklist memories. Always hard-hitting stuff on Keating's website. My Several Worlds on the court case they are involved in. fili on Taiwan-Israel comparisons... David reviews some Taiwan books. fili with an excellent post with some numbers on how Taiwan's economy is doing. Very well, of course, even in comparison to our neighbors. Rank has a similarly themed piece that is also good. Poagao muses on native speakers of Chinese speaking to each other and to non-native speakers. Global Voices online with blogposts on the Diaoyutai mess. Note how quickly that made-for-media nonevent disappeared from view. The Foreigner nicely satirizes it. Taiwan Photographers features Neil Wade.
MEDIA: Polaris Securities Director's body found in the sea, apparent suicide. The legislature restored funding for the cruise missiles. Taiwan's hand tool industry. USTDC with photos of Eisenhower's 1960 visit here. After KMT officialdom reassured investors that the Taiwan economy was sound (I thought it sucked, that's what they've said for the last eight years, right?)
foreign investors promptly went out and sold NT$10 billion in Taiwan stocks. Local investment trusts bought 'em up. The Jamestown China Brief has good ones on the military downsizing plan and China-Thailand ties, and China's view of its military strength.
[Taiwan]
8 comments:
There's some interesting military stuff here. Good news about the cruise missiles!
As for China's perception of its military and the handling of the Sichuan crisis, here is another article that might shade the picture in a bit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/world/asia/02china.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin
The Jamestown China Brief kind of glosses over the Chinese military's performance in Sichuan, but the NYT article goes into detail. Supposedly, for example, it took 44 hours to get troops into Wenchuan. With a well-equipped and well-trained airforce, it should have taken two.
Taiwan indeed has good reasons to worry towards the middle of this century, especially if idiots such as Ma remain in charge.
I just noticed a diary on Taiwan at Daily Kos.
Nothing about Independence Day of your home country?
Great Daily Kos link.
I notice that Ma is compared to Obama, and the comparisons are astounding. Both are good looking and charismatic while inspiring teen-age crushes on them. Both promise change. Both try to hide or de-emphasize the full extent of their extreme (pro-China for Ma, liberal for Obama) views and records. Both have foreign family ties (of course we don't know if Obama considers those ties important the way Ma seems to - so far we haven't seen any reason to believe so). Both get free passes from most of the media because the media agree with them on major issues. Both face opponents from extremely weak parties.
Similarities between the parties show up within the Daily KOS diary. The diarist focuses on the few appointments the DPP has blocked while ingoring the many that the KMT blocked during the 8 year DPP presidency. Similarly the Repbulican president has had many of his appointments held up during his 8 year presidency. I suspect the U.S. media will do the same as the diarist did if Obama is elected and focus on Republican blocking actions while ignoring the Democrats similar actions for 8 years.
Of course the U.S. did get a few judicial appointments through in a bipartisan manner because of leadership of the "Gang of 14" by John McCain who was willing to work with people across the aisle. Meanwhile Obama was unwilling to go the bipartisan route and voted against the compromise.
I'll give the Democrats credit over the KMT on this one thing, though I'm not sure Obama was in this camp, the Democrats didn't engage in the kind of spiteful obstructionism the KMT did, trying to damage the country as much as possible to make the other party's president look bad. Thankfully we haven't seen much of that kind of behavior from either major party in the U.S. .
My understanding is that the Daily KOS is an American modern liberal (Democratic) site. If that's the case, then this appears to be yet another instance of an American modern liberal (Democrat) supporting the fascist KMT. If Michael Turton has any thoughts on why this seems to happen so much I would love to hear them. Jonah Goldberg has a book with an interesting title: Liberal Fascism
As much as I've heard Taiwanese people talk about the "M-shaped" society over the last year or two, I've never seen an evidence that there really is a bimodal distribution of wealth or income.
I'm not saying there isn't, but I would love to see some data supporting it.
Hi mark,
Don't know if you check comments, but the quick answer is no, M-shaped society doesn't exist.
The long answer is wealth and income distributions are usually power-law distributions, which if you want to put a shape to it, basically means a pyramid sort of structure with most people making a little money and very few people making tons of money.
The M-shaped society was a meme started by some Japanese book, using some sleight-of-hand. He took the right side of Japanese income distribution (those above a certain amount of income) and shrunk the horizontal access, essentially bunching together the tail of the distribution in order to create the second hump.
Let's say all this another way. Basically, most people are "poor", and the differences between the rich are _huge_--there are all kinds of rich, like rich, rich-rich, super-duper rich, and super-duper-gazuper-rich, with the differences increasing significantly the higher up you go. It makes for nice rhetoric to hate on the rich "class", but they are a very diverse class themselves with huge differences among them.
The main conclusion though of an increasing inequality in the overall income distribution does, however, hold true. If you look the the Gini coefficent of Taiwan historically, it has been increasing, though even today, it is significantly, significantly more equal than South Korea, the US, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China. In Asia, Taiwan is only second to Japan in income equality (yes, Japan is weird, and yes it is ironic that the most income equal society is complaining about income inequality. Hmm... wait a minute... maybe the sensitivity to inequality is exactly what keeps them so equal).
If you want to see some graphs for yourself, you can try looking for references in Chinese, I have seen some around on blogs. Hope that helps.
I've been deeply skeptical of what people here have been saying about Taiwan's economy being "M shaped" and you've confirmed my suspicions. If Taiwanese wealth or income really were bimodal distributions, the graphs would have been fascinating. Seeing another run of the mill Lorenz curve isn't so exciting, though.
It is really nice to know that the whole idea is an artifact of some Japanese author distorting data sets, though.
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