Politics
The KMT in Burma
Reading Panaj Mishra’s NYRB article about Burma, “The Revolt of the Monks,” I was reminded of the KMT’s adventures in Burma, a remarkable episode in the inglorious history of Taiwan’s ruling party. After several pages discussing the brutal suppression of last year’s protest by Burma’s monks, Mishra turns to the political-economic foundation of military rule:
But […]
Separation of Powers
Photo by 翔
If you ask most people, democracy is synonymous with elections. But, strangely enough, few people who live in electoral democracies feel that elections result in a government which truly responds to their concerns. At its best, electoral politics seems to solve the problem of succession which plagued previous forms of government. Although it […]
Lessig
I just donated to Lessig’s congressional campaign fund. Have you?
Obama
Image by Shepard Fairey.
The biggest problem I have with the Clinton legacy is its failure to articulate a strong defense of progressive values. I think we ended up with Bush precisely because of that failure. While Gore and Kerry toyed with progressivism they were ultimately unable to embrace it, allowing the Democratic Party to drift […]
Parallel Voting
Schee posted a link to this article on the new voting system which so affected the Taiwanese legislative elections. (See my last post on this.)
Several countries now mix proportional representation with voting for individual candidates, as Taiwan now does. However, it turns out there are two different models for how the mixing works: the one-vote […]
Disenchanted
Almost every single American newspaper ran stories about the Taiwanese election attributing the DPP’s defeat to “broad disenchantment among Taiwan’s 23 million inhabitants over the combative pro-independence campaign that has been the centerpiece of Chen’s two four-year terms as president.” I don’t know what motivated the average Taiwanese voter to support the KMT’s sweeping victory, […]
Bonus Army
I’ve been thinking a lot about Obama. According to Ezra Klein:
his answer to arguments against consensus rhetoric [see my earlier post] is that his rhetoric is behind that success, it brings in more voters and thus intensifies popular pressure for his agenda
More specifically, his approach is that of
Occupying the moral high ground of unity and […]
Human Rights Day
This is a very complex picture (by Cooloud). Taiwan’s President and Vice-President were prisoners in this building during the White Terror. On Human Rights Day they announced its conversion into a Human Rights Memorial. However, at the same time, “not far from the ceremony, the police were forcefully breaking up a [peaceful] demonstration held by […]
Understatement
It bears no relation to the main point of his article, which focuses on how economic ideology led the Fed into the current “unmitigated disaster” known as the subprime lending debacle, but Paul Krugman chose this interesting quote as the lead-in to his article:
When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his decision […]
Big Table
For those who haven’t been following, Obama’s been doing his best to alienate the progressive left. That’s resulted in him butting heads with two of my favorite people: John Edwards and Paul Krugman. And while it may result in more corporate fundraising for Obama, he’s come out looking much worse for the wear.
Obama has framed […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
