The Wang Choice

After all, the whole Barrayaran Vor system runs on nepotism. It's not a vice for us, it's a lifestyle.

Some hilarious moments from the Rational Party this week. The image above is from the Chu-Wang campaign website OneTaiwan, and this page shows the eduational background and experience of Vice Presidential Candidate Jennifer Wang, in the screen cap above. It shows (1) National Taiwan University Law Department (2) Fujen U Law Grad School (3) High school and (4) Jr high. What's missing? She has a PHD from Renmin U in China. LOL.

I clicked on the video page of the OneTaiwan site and images of gorgeous aboriginal people of both sexes pop right out.

My son LOLed when he rang up the Youtube site of the Chu campaign and observed that netizens were downvoting Chu at 10-1 rates over LIKEs in many vids. LOL.

Lots of fun stuff with Wang this week. Solidarity tweeted this gem -- you can't make this stuff up:

ジェームス ‏@jmstwn
Too good to be true: as of Sep. 2, Jennifer Wang's husband is chief of the Judicial Yuan Department of Government Ethics

Doling out high paying sinecures to connected insiders is just like living in government housing while using the savings from the cheap gov't rent to speculate in real estate. What this sort of thing shows is that for the mainlander elites who run the KMT, the government is basically the means by which the connected mainlander core extracts benefits from the population and transfers these to themselves. Wang is hardly alone... mainlanders are like 8% of the population but a third of the bureaucracy, and they dominate appointments to high position in the Ma Ying-jeou Administration.

...You might think it was stupid of Chu to pick someone like Wang with so many problems, but the at the top of the colonial class this pathology is a lifestyle and most are tainted by it, though they themselves see it as normal and not wrong. Almost anyone high level among Chu's own crowd that he picked would have been the same. Wang moved out of the dorms this week.

Don't click on that item above, it's an image. A new campaign video from the Chu-Wang campaign, a kind of complex pun in Chinese. It is a still image and lasts for 85 seconds... with no sound. You can find it on Facebook here. The first comment complains about the bright light on his forehead, and there were several humorous comments from viewers on other sites.

If you troll through videos on Chu's youtube website and the images of him on his campaign website, you'll soon see that in conditions where the KMT can't control the lighting, Chu is somewhat (not very much!) brown-skinned. Obviously this flaw must be covered! So in stills and campaign imagery, Chu's face is very brightly lit from one side. This whites out his brownish skin tone on one side, while shadowing it on the other. Nice.

The truth is that this is a boring election with the polls showing Tsai massively dominating week after week, and Chu slowly slipping and Soong fading, and me not much motivated to blog or write about it. The legislative elections are going to be much more interesting.

I am quoted in the Straits Times this week, on the xenophobic rant on the metro. Enjoy! At Laorencha Jenna was all over that...
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Daily Links and Stuff:

• Taiwan Braintrust Latest Newsletter is out!
• Two good ones from Thinking Taiwan: the US arms sale and the DPP, and the Spy Swap that Wasn't. 

Don't forget EATS 2016 Conference in Toronto
Taiwan Studies in Trans* Perspectives: Transdisciplinary, Transnational, and Transcultural
June 10-11, 2016
University of Toronto
Call For Paper(pdf)：https://goo.gl/dG4aMG
Call for paper website: http://www.na-tsa.org/new/2016/main-theme
Deadline of Abstract Submission: January, 08, 2016

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