As the great Richard Pryor once said, “People are people, all over the world… they fck with your luggage in Nairobi just like they fck with your luggage in Newark.” And every society has its own workarounds for the universal belief that Tha Gubmint doesn’t want you to know THE TRUTH. Of course, citizens in the PRC have far more reason to be suspicious of their appointed oligarchs:
… The Peopleâs Recreation Community bookstore and several others on Hong Kongâs teeming shopping streets specialize in selling books and magazines banned by the Chinese government, mostly for their luridly damning accounts of party leaders, past and present. And at a time when many Chinese citizens smolder with distrust of their leaders, business is thriving.
âWe come here to buy books that we canât read in China,â said Huang Tao, a salesman of nutritional supplements from southeast China, who picked out a muckraking volume recently about corruption among senior party leaders. âThere are so many things that weâve been deceived over,â he said, waving toward books on the devastating famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s, an episode that official histories have muffled in euphemisms. âWe canât learn the truth, so black becomes white and white becomes black.â …
They contain accounts of every conceivable scandal of the past. Then there are the gloomy prophecies about Chinaâs future. One book foretells a war with Japan in 2014, another a toppling of the current leadership that same year. The strongest seller among these feverish jeremiads, â2014: The Great Collapse,â says the fall of the Communist Party is assured, citing what it says are secret party documents. âThis is not gossip or soothsaying,â the preface declares…
âItâs like when your National Enquirer becomes your only form of political discussion,â said Geremie BarmĂ©, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra who studies Chinese culture and politics. âThis is a tragedy that the party has generated for itself. Its processes are all cloaked from the public.â
Yet many readers of banned publications from Hong Kong are themselves Chinese officials, often eager for gossip that can help them navigate treacherous political shoals. The books and magazines are surviving the onslaught of online material in part because so many of their readers are officials who fear using the Internet to look at forbidden material or lack the skill to thwart censorship, said Mr. Tang.
âYou donât have to read the Peopleâs Daily, because that wonât tell you whatâs really going on, but you have to read these,â said Ho Pin, an exiled Chinese journalist who runs Mirror Books, a company based in New York that publishes muckraking books and magazines in Chinese. Chinese officials visiting Hong Kong often buy them as gifts for fellow officials, he said. âIn the past, youâd give a mayor a bottle of liquor. But thatâs nothing these days, and so is a carton of cigarettes,â Mr. Ho said. âBut if you give him one of our books or magazines, heâll be very happy.â
Somewhere inside the Beltway, Jonathan Karl is weeping for missed opportunities.
RinaX
So I just visited Little Green Footballs, and apparently the wingnuts are outraged by a “quote” from President Obama’s speech today at Morehouse where he supposedly says “I’m a Black Man”. Now, this doesn’t appear to be an actual direct quote, but for the life of me I can’t understand why it would matter if he had said it. But by stating this he is clearly signaling his intent to come for the guns of all hard-working (white) Americans. Or something.
Redshirt
We’re all precious snowflakes.
MikeJ
@RinaX: But don’t you dare call them racist! Sorry, raaaa-cist. Because they don’t hate him at all for his race, they just bring it up all the time for no reason whatsoever. Obviously you’re the real racist because you noticed their racism.
Baud
Li Keqiang is worse than Wen Jiabao. He sold us out!
Forum Transmitted Disease
I’d take some serious issue with this statement. Ours are a lot better at lying about their acts, aims and intentions. The Chinese oligarchs will tell you to your face that they hire zoo designers to work out their factory dormitory arrangements. I frankly find that degree of honesty refreshing.
Mnemosyne
@RinaX:
I have this theory about why wingnuts hate Obama so much that I’m going to repeat even though I’m sure regular commenters are sick of it: I really think one of the reasons they hate him is that he consciously chose to live his life as a black man. He didn’t have to — he could have decided to marry a white woman, work for a white-shoe law firm (pun intended), and live on the fringes of the white social and political world without too much trouble. That’s what Clarence Thomas did, and he was able to become a Supreme Court justice.
But instead Obama chose to move to Chicago while Harold Washington was mayor, marry a black woman, and work his way up through black social and political circles with the support of people like Valerie Jarrett. He went around white people to become successful rather than letting them grant that success to him out of the kindness of their hearts. IMO, a lot of wingnuts see that as a rejection of his white roots (and it kinda is) and they can’t forgive him for it.
Roger Moore
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
They may tell you that, but I sincerely doubt that they’ll say the same thing to the Chinese press, and I strongly suspect that they’ll try to censor any Western publication that includes a quote to that effect.
nellcote
OT Has anyone heard from Soonergrunt? Those tornadoes in OK are pretty awful.
Keith
@RinaX: I’m reading LGF and am kind of in shock. Before my mother died in 2006, she had gone hardcore anti-Muslim, Super-Texas neocon and LOVED LGF. Now, I’m reading it, and it’s a site I could actually read. I mean, he’s on Jonathan Karl like white on rice and seems tenacious as hell. And his bit on the Drudge “I’m a black man” false quote is pretty good, too. The whole theme of his site now seems to be “The GOP has lost their goddamn minds”
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Roger Moore: Oh, I wish you were right:
http://www.businessinsider.com/foxconn-animals-2012-1#ixzz1kIGZNNiw
Violet
@Keith: Been that way for awhile. Didn’t he have his conversion near the same time as Cole?
MomSense
@Baud:
HA!!!
Redshirt
@Keith: LGF rules, and Charles is awesome. Cooler than Cole, I daresay.
Keith
@Redshirt: I haven’t added a link to my Favorites list in several years, but LGF is now on my list.
Mnemosyne
@Keith:
Charles Johnson had an awakening very similar to Cole’s, except that Johnson’s “holy shit, these fuckers are crazy” moment happened over Islam and nutcases like Pam Geller rather than Terri Schiavo.
Suffern ACE
Man. I thought you were supposed to go through a period where there were giants like Murrow or Cronkite or some real honest to goodness muckraking champions of the poor before decadence set in and you could no longer tell the difference between news and the national enquirer.
Hopefully it doesn’t get so bad that they start borrowing conspiracy theories from us, changing the names to fit local officials. Like those catholic saints who were de-canonized when it turned out their miracles were actually borrowed from the lives of the Buddha, the future chinese premier will put bongs up as Lunar New Years decorations while his wife will have an affair with the family vet in the Mao Bedroom.
Redshirt
And I say Charles Johnson is cooler than John Cole for the following reasons:
1. CJ knows how to work a database and a website.
2. CJ plays music.
3. CJ has better Fatwas – Hoft, Britetbart, Pam, as compared to BJ obsession on Sully and Brooks.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Redshirt: He even shares his code.
Narcissus
@Mnemosyne: Was it the Times Square Mosque dealio?
jeffreyw
Yes! I would fucking love to go for a walk!
max
@Keith: Iâm reading LGF and am kind of in shock. Before my mother died in 2006, she had gone hardcore anti-Muslim, Super-Texas neocon and LOVED LGF.
Let us not speak ill of the dead, other people’s mothers and my fellow Texans (who aren’t politicians).
Sorry, screw it. I’m sorry for your pain. Also, it sucks to not have a mom.
The whole theme of his site now seems to be âThe GOP has lost their goddamn mindsâ.
Booming business, that. To be a bit unfair to Comrade Cole and LGF, ‘Oh, NOW you get around to noticing.’ Oh, well, better late than never. (One notes here the distinction between being a conservative I disagree with, and an asswipe lunatic/fascist right-winger, which is almost the entirety of the Republican party for awhile now.)
Mnemosyne: IMO, a lot of wingnuts see that as a rejection of his white roots (and it kinda is) and they canât forgive him for it.
I don’t think it involves that much complicated reasoning, so much as straight-forward rationalizing: “There that nigger goes again, being all black and talking back to his betters.” You can pad that out with many many twisty words, but if you started from that, the journey is not worth the candle.
As the great Richard Pryor once said, âPeople are people, all over the world⊠they fck with your luggage in Nairobi just like they fck with your luggage in Newark.â
Yup. No doubt about it.
Stannis appears to have relocated his good sense. About time.
max
[‘I got twenty bucks on the drunken Tyrion against weenieboy Joffrey.’]
patroclus
Hong Kong is really cool in a wide variety of ways. I used to live there and when the PRC re-asserted sovereignty back in 1997 pursuant to the Joint Declaration with the U.K. and promised 50 years of a continued way of life, there was a lot of doubt that that would be so. But there were some that predicted that HK would influence the PRC more so than the PRC would subjugate HK, and 16 years later, it seems that that prediction was accurate. The HK press is kind of wild and the people are very savvy (and hence cynical) and both highly distrust all forms of sovereignty. The “black market” in books and pamphlets criticizing virtually everyone was rampant back in the colonial days as it appears to be now.
(Thankfully, I’m predicting that Joffrey’s days are numbered.)
Yatsuno
@jeffreyw: ZOMG KING CHARLES SPANIELPUPPEH!! SQUEE!!!
Ash Can
@jeffreyw: LOL! That tail is going at the speed of sound.
Redshirt
I am covered in ticks.
Seriously. I’ve pulled off 17 so far tonight.
michelle
Tammy’s gone.
Perhaps the cats got a better deal in the whole exchange.
Mnemosyne
@Narcissus:
I honestly can’t remember what the final break was, but I think the Times Square Mosque happened after he had already walked away. I think it was when Johnson was thinking about going to a conference with his new anti-Muslim friends and realized that every speaker on the panels was a white supremacist.
@max:
There’s a “tell” for if you’re dealing with someone who’s angry that Obama chose to be black — they say things like, You know, his mother was white, so he’s just as white as he is black.
@Redshirt:
Dude, what the hell were you doing, rolling around nude in the underbrush?
Wait, I may not want to know the answer to that.
Yatsuno
The Pens lost. JC is about to go on a serious drunken rampage. Someone watch teh Twitterz.
Chris
@Narcissus:
The story I’ve heard about Charles Johnson’s conversion is that he went to some sort of international conference for activists against “Islamo-fascism” or whatever they’re calling it these days, and found himself surrounded by European neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. That was a bridge too far even for him, he then brought it up on his blog in a “let’s be careful who we associate with, okay?” kind of way, and had his fellow righties open up on him with both barrels as an appeaser, “objectively pro-Muslim,” or whatever. At which point he finally realized that the cause he’d been working for really were a bunch of complete fucking psychos.
I wasn’t following it at the time and didn’t find out about it until a few years later, so I could be wrong. But that’s what was explained to me later, either by someone here or on Sadly, No!
Redshirt
18 – back of the neck. After all that looking and inspecting, still, somehow, on the back of the neck. Ticks!
Suffern ACE
@Chris: yep. Apparently, there’s a few anti-Muslims for whom the notion that there is a Judeo-Christan tradition is not kosher. A Semite is a Semite whether Arab or Jew.
SiubhanDuinne
@michelle:
Tammy looks like a real sweetheart. I am so sorry, and wish I had something more than inadequate words for you.
Chris
@Suffern ACE:
The far right in Europe has been a lot less embarrassed about its fascist history than its American counterpart – the Jonah Goldberg shit doesn’t fly over there. You occasionally have someone like Geert Wilders, who calls himself a libertarian and plays the “they’re the real fascists!” game, but for the most part it’s very well understood that the people who’re afraid of Eurabia are the same ones who were afraid of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion eighty years ago.
Also, found a good article on Johnson’s conversion – http://washingtonindependent.com/39629/civil-war-raging-in-right-wing-blogosphere. Here’s the relevant paragraphs:
MikeJ
@Chris:
Sort of says it all.
Yatsuno
@Chris:
Wow. Subtle they ain’t.
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
If Johnson managed to disrupt communications between US right-wingers and people like Anders Breivik, the whole country may owe him a round of thanks.
James E. Powell
@Mnemosyne:
I think you have something there. But I have to add that one reason that the Obama haters are so apoplectic is that Obama has not really failed. They need him to fail, he just has to. If he is successful and even more, if he is generally perceived to be successful, their entire worldview is shattered. A black president? This just cannot be. Not in their America.
If the next president is a Democratic woman, expect sales of guns, liquor, and prescription drugs to reach all time highs.
James E. Powell
@Redshirt:
Maybe so, but who would you rather have a beer with?
piratedan
blew out (popped) my right hammy this afternoon, looking forward to three days of vicodin induced posting, so apologies in advance :-)
Johnny Coelacanth
I applaud Johnson for his road-to-Damascus moment but I have difficulty mustering up the will to read him, mainly because of the savaging he used to get at the hands of Sadly, No! As a response, he would redirect traffic coming from Sadly, No! to a landing page with an obnoxious animation on it and the words “You are a idiot.” I can forgive him his political trespasses, but fuck anybody who murders grammar like that.
TenguPhule
I am reminded yet again, in China they shoot the too obviously corrupt officials.
And I look at the Republican party and think that the only reason they survive and thrive in America is because of the very freedom and tolerence they want to destroy.