More links on protesters + other links

Protesters plastered this TVBS van with angry messages. The cardboard one says "Thanks TVBS reporters, for working so hard to make fake news for my father and mother to see." TVBS is a rabidly pro-KMT station.

Too tired and too busy to blog, mea culpa. Enjoy some links.

• Chinese netizens are shocked to discover that Taiwan's leading pop band is pro-Taiwan. D'oh.
• Al Qaeda occupies the Legislative Yuan and other absurdities. I got an email from a Deep Blue informing that the student leaders are just professional students who are like the communist leaders of the 1930s. LOL.
• Frozen Garlic on non-violence and state coercive power
• Student Leader Lin Fei-fan is meeting with Ma. Rather than go down and meet the protesters like Lee Teng-hui did with the Wild Lily, Ma has invited him, Emperor-style, to meet with him in his Throne Room office. 
• Tainan Mayor Lai, often mentioned as a future presidential candidate, criticizes Ma for his treatment of the protesters.
• Fortune CNN: Between Democracy and a Hard Place. The report is surprisingly good. ADDED: commenter notes: The Fortune CNN article is rife with error, I'm not sure what's surprisingly good about it. LY, not EY, for the first occupation. 12,000 is not the largest protest ever. EY on Sunday night wasn't taken "again." That's a serious error that shows ignorance about the ongoing occupation at the LY and what that means about the protests.The final paragraph links functional democracy to the unpopular Ma administration, as if voters have only themselves to blame for what has/hasn't been done since he took office. It's a shockingly ignorant piece, sadly.
• TIME's report, from its Beijing correspondent. I've got an idea TIME. Why don't you source your reportage of the Ukraine from your correspondent in Sao Paulo?
• NY Times: Taiwan gov stands behind the use of force against the protesters. 
• Stratfor on the protests.
• The new East Asian Journal of Popular Culture
• Bloomberg editor quits over China coverage
• What would the US do if China invaded Taiwan?
• My Missing Mongolia: inspired by Crimea, Chinese netizens demand the Qing Empire

The foreign media almost uniformly refuses to give any poll data on public support for the pact nor does it supply any data on the agreement that explains why public support is so low. The disagreement is always treated as a disagreement over China policy and identity and never as stemming from the particulars of the Pact, which, in the neoliberal economic religion of foreign correspondents, is a trade pact and therefore Holy Writ. No one seems able to grasp that fewer would be objecting if the pact were not such an obvious sellout, since everyone realizes the importance of trade. The foreign media thinks it is a fly on the wall, but it is just a bug caught in Establishment amber. Even before the protests, support was only at 32%, meaning that roughly a third of the voters for Ma don't support the pact. Meaning that this is not a simple Blue-Green issue. Now support has basically halved in the week of the demonstration, with everyone focused on the pact here. If only 18% support not renegotiating the services pact at the moment, this isn't an identity issue.

Poll news: TVBS came out with another poll. A summary:

The poll is a total rejection of Ma's position on the CSSTA: 63% now support withdrawal and new negotiations with China vs.18% opposing that. Further, 51% support LY occupation (+3% since last week), 38% oppose it (-2%). Then most people don't agree with EY occupation (58% vs. 30%). But they also oppose the methods used by the police to clear the EY of students (56% vs. 35%).

Jerome writes on the March 30 breakfast club:

As mentioned earlier we will have our Breakfast Club meeting on Sunday, March 30 at 10 am.

Topic:"White Terror, Dark Prison 白恐黑牢." David has been in Taiwan doing research on KMT killings and imprisonments during the White Terror period. He has purposely covered such on both waishengren and benshenren.

Speaker: David Curtis Wright Ph.D. Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary.

The venue is the same as it has traditionally been. Time is 10 am.
The meeting location is the restaurant 婷婷翠玉 at 174 AnHe Road, Section Two. (rough translation of name is Tender, Pretty Green Jade.)
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