Wednesday, December 07, 2005

US Told Off Over Hong Kong Remarks

The Chinese told the US to mind its own business after the State Department commented on the democracy movement in Hong Kong. I personally can't decide what set the Administration off. Was it the prisoners held without any rights whatsover in CIA a system of semi-secret prisons? Was it the recent allegations of torture in Iraq and Afganistan? Could it be that Chinese voters face a rigged election system in Florida, Ohio, and elsewhere? Do you think it is the Patriot Act laws that limit civil rights? Could it be the ruling party's staged NOLA photo-ops? Is it that the leader of the nation removes protestors from his vicinity, creates "free speech zones", and only listens to those who support him behaves as if detached from reality? Could it be that that ruling party leadership favors Halliburton cronies and its own children? Could the Alaska oil drilling, sell-off of national park resources recent pollution events in China have motivated the Administration?

I certainly can't decide.

3 comments:

Mark said...

Americans do have universal sufferage, which was the topic at hand. All those other problems are because they elected an idiot who surrounds himself with idiots. The worst thing is that when I went home last time, it seemed like nobody had any concept of how bad it's gotten. I guess it's just like Winston Churchill said:

"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."

Michael Turton said...

Yeah, but my position is that the idiot wasn't elected. He got power thanks to electronic voting machines that were rigged, and by electoral shenanigans.

Mark said...

Don't get me started about the vote tabulating machines.

Since Diebold kept the source code proprietary, nobody is quite sure how the votes were/are audited. The company claims that their machines are "self-auditing", which should be more than a little disturbing.

There were numerous discussionsabout this issue on slashdot. The machines have known security issues, and have been central to lawsuits before. In one case, there was even a demonstration in which a trained chimp successfully hacked the machines.

The mere fact that closed source vote machines are still allowed should be enough to say that a fair vote isn't that big of a priority to those in charge.