 - Last login: 6 hours agoLaodan
- laodan is a 56 year old guy from Wisconsin, USA.
- Likes 1,586 pages, 24 videos, 8 photos • 227 fans • Received 64 reviews
- Member since Aug 08, 2005
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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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Favorites » His geopolitics pages
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EastSouthWestNorth: The Olympic Torch Relay Inside China
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May 8, 4:57pm
6 reviews
china, globalization, geopolitics
http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20080509_1.htm
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The Olympic Torch Relay Inside China
via Fons Tuinstra / China Herald, in EastSouthWestNorth
Yes, the crowds were enthusiastic so far. But it also reveals the civic quality of some (but not necessarily all) Chinese citizens as shown in these photos
 The Olympic Torch Relay Inside China
We Westerners represent no more than 10 % of the world population. What a pity we know so little of what is going on in the rest of the world.
We have been bombarded lastly with the coverage of the troubled Torch Relay in London, Paris and San Francisco and been force-fed with the idea that China was trouble. But what about the torch relay thereafter? Ziltch nada black hole.
Did the flame not traverse the lands where 90% of the world population lives? Yes it did but we were kept in total ignorance. Why such a one sided news coverage? This is not the best way to succeed in answering the myriad of crises unleashed upon us by modernity but it is assuredly a recipe for tension between nations...
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Informed Comment: Global Affairs: CHINAS COMING OUT PARTY
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Apr 9, 6:11pm
1 review
china, us, geopolitics, eu
http://icga.blogspot.com/2008/04/chinas-coming-out-party.html
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CHINA'S COMING OUT PARTY
in Informed Comment: Global Affairs, by Philip J. Cunningham
And then what?
What good can the gratuitous and unthinking humiliation of a trauma-racked nation of 1.3 billion people possibly serve?
The antic cheerleading of demonstrations seen in recent weeks, when not outright rude or violent, has the one-sided nature of school spirit, being true to one's school at the expense of others. In trying to bring attention to one set of problems without thinking through the consequences of attention-grabbing shocks, racist chants and media stunts, a whole new set of problems is set into motion.
Racially-tinged currents of rejection, betrayal and resentment are surging to the fore in a new, yet wholly unnecessary, confrontation between East and West.
CHINA'S COMING OUT PARTY
Beware an angry China
The Protests, The Olympics, And The Yellow Peril.
Excellent, Excellent article.
Cunningham is right on the mark. These last few days of what appeared as rejection, in our windows on the world, has the potential to drive us all straight toward a future confrontation between East and West; a wholly unnecessary confrontation that whiteman is bound to lose.
The 20th century has illustrated how the capitalistic competition between European "micro-nations" (micro at the scale of the world) could lead to the barbarity of 2 very destructive wars.
Today's capitalistic competition is between world-blocs:
- China and the larger Confucian area make up over 25% of the world population and are the most successful at the capitalistic game.
- Europe and the US barely make up 10% of the world population and are in economic retreat.
- Everything indicates that the other nations representing the remaining 65% of the world population, in case of conflict between East and West, would align in their very large majority with China against the West.
Is this what we want as an outcome?
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Pankaj Mishra: At war with the utopia of modernity | Comment is free | The Guard…
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Apr 2, 8:59am
4 reviews
china, geopolitics, modernity, worldviews
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/22/tibet.china1
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Tibet at war with the utopia of modernity
in The Guardian by Pankaj Mishra and in "Informed Comment: Global Affairs" by Philip J. Cunningham.
Tibetans' rage is directed not at communist rule, but the consumerist threat to their traditions and sacred lands.
Well-off Chinese supporting harsh suppression of the "ingrate" Tibetans echo the middle-class media commentators in Delhi and Mumbai who egg on the police to "crush" those daring to resist their dispossession. But then corporate globalisation has rarely been more successful in inculcating a culture of greed and brutality among its most educated beneficiaries. Western commentators may continue to tilt at the straw man of communism in China. Tibetans, however, seem to have sensed that they confront a capitalist modernity more destructive of tradition, and more ruthlessly exploitative of the sacred land they walk on, than any adversary they have known in their tormented history.
At war with the utopia of modernity by Pankaj Mishra
MIDDLE WAY TO THE MIDDLE KINGDOM by Philip J. Cunningham
Reading the media recently about what is going on in Tibet one is confronted mostly with propaganda that is reminiscent of the old days of the cold war and don't get me wrong it is not just Beijing that propagandizes; Western media and NGO's are equally painting their reporting and affirmations in propaganda colors.
Here are 2 articles that stand out for their more objective tone.
Pankaj Mishra observes a totalitarian modernity that is fighting the resistance of "primitivism" or religion or localism. The fact is that Tibetans like muslims and other local cultures are resisting their dispossession at the hands of capital holders. In the case of Tibet the capital holders are the Communist Chinese State and some of its Han citizens.
Philip J. Cunningham narrates the dilemma of the Dalai Lama. "... after going on the CIA payroll at a time when the US sought to wage psychological warfare in tandem with covert destabilizing of China along its borders from 1959-1972"; the Dalai Lama is now preaching socialism as the future economic road for Tibet. What he envisions is not socialism with Chinese characteristics but socialism in its pure Marxist form. A form of socialism that he hopes will come to the rescue of traditional Tibetan culture that is being aggressed by the modernity of the logic of capital.
The comments on Pankaj Mishra's article are most illuminating.
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United States - International Diplomacy - Economic Trends - World Economy - Poli…
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Jan 27, 4:19pm
1 review
economics, globalization, geopolitics
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?ei=5070&em=&en=d162...
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Waving Goodbye to Hegemony
in the NYT Magazine by PARAG KHANNA
The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an "East-West" struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.
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The Big Three are the ultimate "Frenemies". Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell's 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China.
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The rise of China in the East and of the European Union within the West has fundamentally altered a globe that recently appeared to have only an American gravity - pro or anti. As Europe's and China's spirits rise with every move into new domains of influence, America's spirit is weakened. The E.U. may uphold the principles of the United Nations that America once dominated, but how much longer will it do so as its own social standards rise far above this lowest common denominator? And why should China or other Asian countries become "responsible stakeholders", in former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick's words, in an American-led international order when they had no seat at the table when the rules were drafted? Even as America stumbles back toward multilateralism, others are walking away from the American game and playing by their own rules.
Waving Goodbye to Hegemony
What PARAG KHANNA illustrates is one moment (nowadays) within a process of economic globalization that rebounded as a consequence of:
1. China's entry into modernity after the end of the cultural revolution that unleashed its opening up and its economic reform package (privatization of agricultural activities in the eighties, industrial realignment in the nineties and conquest of foreign markets after 2000).
2. Europe's slow entry into postmodernity as a rejection of the barbarity that the second world war inflicted on European nations. The process of unification that started in the fifties between Germany and France (coal and steel) dragged slowly into an institutional centralization of an increasing number of political competencies while an increasing number of nations were absorbed in what developed into the EU. The next steps will transform the EU from a bureaucracy of technicians into a permanently growing supranational institution based on the principle of negotiation between its constituent parties.
We are indeed at a juncture of human history when modernity is:
1. absorbing the whole world into its worldview (logic of capital, rationalism, industry, science and technology). The completion of modernity signals that we are in its late stages...
2. the European experiment at unifying nation states signals the early stages of, what follows modernity, a postmodern area for which we still don't have a word.
The sheer size and speed of the changes happening at this juncture between modernity and postmodernity dwarfs anything humanity has experienced at any other time.
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