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.
[Taiwan] [US] [China] [Bush] [human rights]
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:
ReplyDelete"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
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.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me started about the vote tabulating machines.
ReplyDeleteSince 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.