The mythopoetics of Taiwanese mob behavior: I wrote a while back on Chen Shui-bian's role as communal scapegoat. Disqualified Taekwondo athelete Yang Shu-chun, young, female, virginal, has been cast in a similar play, but her role is the opposite of Chen's. She's the Sinless One, the Virtuous Accused, who by her sacrifice of innocence takes onto herself all the manifold instances of Taiwanese sports cheating, and washes that stain away.
What's being judged on the blogs this week?
BLOGS:
- Frozen Garlic echoes opinion of many others on KMT Taipei rally: it was a dud. Also on Chu rally in Xinbei: ok
- Ben on the shiny new Taichung Municipal Hall
- Taiwan Airpower on a new Japanese era airdrome he found near Hsinchu
- Sinocentric on how people talk about themselves as Han in Taiwan
- Laowiseass starts new job, has new insights.
- Baekdu volcano about to erupt? Could cause serious problems for the region.
- The Furor over Yang: Frozen Garlic is disgusted.
- DPP beats KMT in social media use
- Frozen Garlic with a great post on the DPP evolution in Taichung
- The China Beat on US fear of China, with tons of links and analysis
- China causes another Taiwan athlete to lose. Sigh.
- War clouds over Taiwan -- J Michael's excellent piece
- A collection of articles on Japan's mulling sending troops to Yoniguni Island
- The well-known Korea blog The Marmot's Hole on the Yang disqualification. Koreans are very puzzled by this.
- Bias in media watchdog group
- China Brief: Implications of China's Jialong submersible
- China Steel and Chinese steel company to team up for ore exploration
- CS Monitor: China's opposition to Liu Nobel has simply brought it more recognition
- Science education in Taiwan turning students off to science.
- Taiwan dollar rising faster than Yuan. This is scaring exporters.
- Taichung is going to build this weird tower?
- Taiwan grows 9.8% in third quarter.
- US escalates again in Afghanistan. O my poor country!
- Compare this weird AP article on the KMT rally in Taipei with this Taipei Times piece. Note that rally was a dud in reality [commenter below says it wasn't]. I wish AP would stop using the KMT code-phrase "sluggish economy" -- it smacks of bias. Not to mention that it is total nonsense.
- Foreigners still find Taiwan an accepting place
- YANG SHU CHUN DISQUALIFICATION: Loon eggs korean school in Taiwan. Special Envoy Ovid Tseng sent to Guangzhou to help Yang. ATU to probe Yang disqualification at Taiwan's request. President Ma sensibly points out that the incident did not involve the South Korean government and people. ADDED: WTF Sec-Gen has been accused of corruption in connection with the Olympics a couple of years ago.
- Hitler = WTF Sec-Gen on the Yang Shu-chun disqualification
- Su Chia-chun ad for Taichung
- Face of Taiwan -- welcoming the world
- Work with data? Need easy to use mapping tool? Try OpenHeatMap
- Methane is the hidden time bomb that will kill virtually all life on earth if we don't get down to zero carbon right away.
- An excellent piece on The Aging Boom sweeping the world: "But with its stringent one-child policy and exceptionally low birth rate, China is rapidly evolving into what demographers call a "4-2-1" society, in which one child becomes responsible for supporting two parents and four grandparents."
Charity Paintball Tournament in Taichung for Taichung Animal Protection Association
_______________________[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.
13 comments:
The problem with relying on secondhand reports coupled with personal biases is that one chooses anything that backs up one's hope that those biases prove true. Case in point - KMT rally as a dud.
Put simply, it wasn't. The crowd at Taipei City Hall an hour before it started was huge. By the time the march actually began, there were people bunched up everywhere. It took a good 30-45 minutes for the entire parade to pass by, and that was before traffic and tired feet caused the marchers to spread out. It was a motivated, excited crowd.
As a neutral observer who has been following election rallies and protest marches from all of the parties since the birth of Taiwan's democracy, yesterday's rally stacks up well. Not as big as Shih Ming-te's 2006 event, or the 2004 Hands Across Taiwan event, but definitely one of the biggest in recent years.
Interesting to note was that the KMT attracted a much wider cross-section of society yesterday compared with some of the recent DPP events.
Sorry, I gotta go with what is reported to me by multiple individuals present plus all the news media reports.
Michael
"Interesting to note was that the KMT attracted a much wider cross-section of society yesterday compared with some of the recent DPP events."
Hilarious. Cite a single media report that says this.
"Interesting to note was that the KMT attracted a much wider cross-section of society yesterday"
well...KMT did hired a bunch of hot female models. I don't want to objectify women, but yes, some young people follow their dix, not their brains. lol
I thought the Commonwealth article was good, but I'd love to see the breakdown by region as I'm willing to bet a steak dinner that Taipei City's results would look a whole lot different from the rest of the countries. It did confirm that most students don't do enough experiments and knowing your average disinterested Taiwanese student, I can't say I actually blame the teacher. The change that happens in decent students during 5th and 6th grade disgusts me.
Hilarious. Cite a single media report that says this.
There was no claim that it came from the media. It's pretty obvious, based on what was said above, that it was an eyewitness observation.
well...KMT did hired a bunch of hot female models.
Did they also hire white collar professionals, children, students, the elderly. Hell, even a few binlang chewing farmers were seen.
I personally don't care who is there. They could hire martians if they want. Makes no difference, the country is still run by corporations and corruption on all sides.
Yes, I took my daughter out of junior high for that reason. I bet you're right about Taipei.
I'm actually more and more shocked at the difference in educational availability outside of Taipei City versus Taipei City. My small anchingban in Taipei City had full art, go, mad/crazy science, Chinese lit(!) and computer classes. My much larger school in Changhua has none of those. I've been all over Changhua county and have seen nothing that even comes close to participatory education versus book learning. I'm sure Matt Bronsin knows a few places however in back alleys, but outside of a few art buxibans for art, nothing else is available.
I can't understand teaching physics and chemistry without experiments. That's the whole point of those classes and what makes an otherwise dry boring subject very exciting.
I am looking forward to the science kits though for 5 year olds when my kids each turn 5. I'm pretty worried about education for my kids in Taiwan. I know how important anchingban can be, but damn those anchingban teachers can be harpies of the first degree. Who knew yelling every 5 minutes was such an effective educational technique?
Becoming a scientist is a catch-22. Like others have pointed out, it's no secret that science education in Taiwan is a fast track to apathy. The system sucks. But in order to get into one of the better science universities, one has really commit to the education system. (The so-called "disgusting change".) So you've got kids that would've liked to be scientists, but couldn't keep up, and kids that can keep up, but have already lost interest as a result. The only real winners are the few geniuses that have the intellectual capital to earn free rides and to learn science their own way.
Well Observer, my observation is that you are blindly pro-Blue cheerleader that can't see the failure of the parade for what it was.
A friend writes:
it is quite easy to refute the absurd notion that the KMT rally was a success.
The person confirms that it took 35-40 minutes for the marchers to pass his/her location. I took three rough measurements of how many people passed by location (near Chunghsiao/Kuangfu intersection) and came up with an estimate of 180 per minute for relatively ``dense`` sections. One also has to discount a few minutes for traffic light changes. So let`s be nice and, including people walking on the sidewalk, say 200 persons per minute for 30 minutes. That equals 6,000 for the one and only column. Photographic evidence abounds that the march was not generally ``dense`` and occupied only one half of Chunghsiao. If we look at the Taipei Times photograph, we can see that the crowd only occupies an area between Jingfumen and half of way to Kungyuan Road and fizzles out right after Jingfumen. That`s about enough for 10,000 at most. A march of even 50,000 would take at least two hours to pass (and would be really packed at that). For 70,000 to have participated in the 35-40 minute parade would have been physically impossible.
The commentator in question has evidently never been (much less professionally covered) a really big march.
Well Observer, my observation is that you are blindly pro-Blue cheerleader that can't see the failure of the parade for what it was.
From long experience, whenever someone arrives here to announce they are neutral, they are invariably pro-Blue.
It's interesting to see some of the rebuttals here. Let's take a look.
The commentator in question has evidently never been (much less professionally covered) a really big march.
There was never any claim to be a professional. I'm not police, I'm not media so why should I have professional experience at it? I didn't claim it, so why assume it?
Well Observer, my observation is that you are blindly pro-Blue cheerleader that can't see the failure of the parade for what it was.
From long experience, whenever someone arrives here to announce they are neutral, they are invariably pro-Blue.
Obviously this blog only recognizes black and white, not the shades of gray in the middle. It seems that if you're not strongly pro-green, you must be pro-blue.
The funny thing is I normally have a very high opinion of the pro-green side because of tolerance and openness that they normally show, but it's not on display here.
Oh well, while you're all busy chatting on a blog on Saturday, I'll be doing my civic duty and voting for my chosen candidate.
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