News from today: high school students invaded the MOE over the textbook issue. Apparently 30 were arrested and taken away for interrogation. This is unlikely to cure their militancy. The police declared the area a crime scene and then detained several journalists who attempted to enter, hauling them off for interrogation.
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Daily Links:
- Stupid, uninformed anonymous commentary in WSJ says Taiwan will be more vulnerable to China's bullying if nuke plants are mothballed. Sooooo wrong. Those plants leave us terribly vulnerable to blackmail ("Surrender or we will breach containment with missiles") as well as accidents and stupidity. See James Guo's piece from this Taiwan Communique. Taiwan will never be safe until we are 100% renewable.
- Singapore piece on the tough road ahead faced by the Taiwan candidates
- Sturdy piece from D Fell at the China Policy Institute blog on the Hung candidacy. Of note: her candidacy does not reflect any "growing influence of the Legislative Yuan"; if the LY had clout, Wang Jin-pyng would have been the candidate. And the "middle" on identity is "Taiwanese" and on China-Taiwan relations, its "get the economic benefits but not get swallowed."
- What do Beijingers think of Taiwan? in ChinaRealTime. Largely an exercise in demonstrating that everyone knows what to say.
- Death Toll in water park disaster reaches 9. 162 still in critical condition.
- Solidarity with the translation of Hung's acceptance speech. The other day he remarked that Hung sees herself as a centrist because she spends so much time inside the KMT bubble around people who are to the weird right of her, demanding immediate assaults to retake China, or praying for a CCP conquest of Taiwan. It's a scary speech.
- SCHOLARLY: Crosscurrents has a special issue on marriage migration in Taiwan
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10 comments:
I managed to read the WSJ article and comments prior to it getting locked up to subscription only.
What is absolutely amazing is not a single comment mentioned what should have been a huge red flag: the mothballed 4th nuclear power plant was 20 miles from Taipei.
I am not at all an anti-nuke activist. But just from a common sense prospective, who would put 3 of the 4 nuclear power plants all within 30 miles from the political and economic center of a country?
I would love to ask WSJ and the commenters this one single issue. If this is your country, would you allow the nuke plants to continue operating within such close proximity to 1/3 of your population?
Allow me to try to make sense of this latest student break-in - by collective consciousness. KMT-gov's contempt for human life caused the death of a young Taiwanese soldier two years ago. It trigger a huge protest, which later on lead to sun flower break-on. Again, K-gov's contempt for human life was shown again in the powder fire death in New Taipei City.
As more burned victims are reported dead, the fear for their future life becomes rage toward the root cause, which is the K-gov. MOE again showed contempt for transparent process first, Ann then for the students' concern. It simply sent their rage up through the roof. Break-in is now inevitable in collective consciousness.
No battle would be more fierce than the ones, in which young men fight against the angel of death. We see it in the burn-treatment beds, and we will see it in the high school students' next protests, and next and next.
The WSJ piece even references Fukushima, yet never mentions we get quakes and tsunamis too. In fact that tsunami assessment for the fourth nuke plant was never completed, probably because the plant is threatened by two types of tsunamis: waves caused by quakes, and waves caused by the volcanos at Guishan Island, which has a collapse scar showing that it has already produced massive waves in prehistoric times.
Oh, and nuke fuel is imported, just like petrol and coal, as are many of the parts, as I recall.
Michael
not only do we need to import nuke fuel, but we would have to export nuke waste.
meanwhile plenty of geothermo and solar potentials just wasting away.
"...Again, K-gov's contempt for human life was shown again in the powder fire death in New Taipei City."
You know, I'm very far from being a fan of government but that incident was due to the negligence and stupidity of the organizers, not the "K-gov". If you do actually expect omnipotence from the government, then there's a country not far from here where they actually hold some sort of pretence to that ambition.
negligence- I was hoping that someone would bring up this word :-)
That Hung speech reads like the ramblings of a mentally insane person. The worst of the worst kmtard.
The recent student demonstration piqued my interest in how Taiwan's history is written nowadays. So I went and saw a thick book with glossy papers on Taiwan's history in a book store the other day. It was a campus bookstore in a university, and there are several copies, so I thought that maybe someone is using it as a textbook. Skimming through it gave me quite a shock.
In the preface it says that Taiwan belongs to China is a self-evident truth. In the afterword it blames the Green Administration for ideological governance and causing identity crises. In the chapter on Japanese colonization, it reluctantly admits Japanese contribution to infrastructure, but went on to emphasize how it benefits the colonizers more. In the chapter on Chen Yi, it gave many praises to Chen Yi; one section uses an anecdote about filling the stores on a certain street, magically, as an example of Chen Yi's efficiency. It created a WTH moment when I vaguely recollected what Kerr said about those days.
When I was in college they say that history is inevitably subjective and it is better to drop the pretense at objectivity and make your position clear. This book proves that the second part of that argument is very wrong.
Sitting next to the aforementioned book was another possibly-textbook; it invites the reader to ask "Whose story" is Taiwan's history. I certainly hope that the first textbook I mentioned is only used as a bad example in the course.
@anon
Don't dig further. Otherwise you will feel chill sent down your spine.
The thing I find most disturbing about this, is that there are people who actually take school textbooks seriously to begin with. If you want to pass your exams and get a job later, then that's just the shite you have to regurgitate for the Kim Jong-uns in the ministry of education. Everyone knows that.
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