Outrage

I think of all the images in the Spiegel photo series on last night's terror attacks in Mumbai, this is the one that most effectively sums it up.


It simply shows what's left behind when people going about their daily business are mown down by fanatics.

Sickening.

(Image source.)

[UPDATE]: Fitting words for the above picture from Ophelia.

Lessons in tenacity

On never giving up:

A restaurant chef has ended up in hospital after a turtle bit his foot to escape the cooking pot in a Hong Kong restaurant — but it will still be cooked this week, according to a news report.

The 60-centimetre wattle-necked, soft-shelled turtle sank its teeth into the chef's foot, during a dash for freedom as it was about to be put in boiling water on Monday, the South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday.

The chef was taken to hospital with a suspected broken toe, while the turtle - a delicacy worth hundreds of dollars - was put back in a cage, having successfully won a temporary reprieve.

(Via The Wife. German language report here.)

Tales from the Middle (-class?) Kingdom

I'm a bit preoccupied with work-related writing and data-entry (as I have embarked on my first ever foray into quantitative history...fortunately, I'm working with someone who knows his stuff...) as well as fighting off an illness that seems to have encased my neurons in some kind of dense, wool-like substance.

Hence the lack of my accustomed level of verbiage on this humble blog.

Not to worry, that will no doubt change soon.

Till then, I can recommend this interesting essay by John Lee (via) on the potential (or lack thereof) for democratic change in China in the wake of its economic reforms over the last few decades.

Lee observes:

To be sure, we have no choice but to continue to engage with China in the hope that continued economic reforms and rising prosperity there will eventually lead to political reform. But we should reject the blind and deterministic logic that a rising China will inevitably become a democratic one. Even if we believe that authoritarian China is on the wrong side of history, so far it is doing a good job of defying it.

Why this might be so is helpfully explained by several passages in the piece, such as this one (I have removed the footnotes, which are available in the original essay):

That the middle classes—from the private and public sectors alike—have little appetite for democratic reform is easily explained: they have much to gain from the current political status quo and potentially much to lose should it change.

Eva Bellin observes that state-led development breeds a dependence on the state in capital and labour, and tends to exacerbate inequality. Within one generation, China has gone from being the most equal to the least equal society in Asia. Its Gini coefficient (a measurement of income inequality) is now 0.47, up from 0.16 in the 1970s. There are between fifty million and two hundred million middle-class people (depending on what definition you use), but around one billion people who have missed out on the benefits of economic liberalisation. Much of China’s progress actually occurred from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. Going by the World Bank’s definition of poverty, 80% of people emerging from it in China did so up to the mid-1980s. Since then, of China’s one billion poor, about four hundred million have seen their disposable incomes stagnate or decline.

I was reminded of something that Francis Sedgemore, referring to comments by Slavoj Žižek, recently pointed out:

capitalism doesn’t always bring democracy. Anyone who thinks otherwise is blind to both history and the reality of the world around them today.

Yes indeedy.

Intervening where necessary

Timothy Garton Ash has been both defended and mocked at this location.

Yesterday, however, he wrote something well worth reading (all the more surprising considering the place where it appeared) about the aftermath of the devastating cyclone in Burma.

I have no doubt that we have a responsibility to act in this case, and that we have just cause to do so without the explicit consent of Burma's illegitimate rulers, who are letting their people die rather than letting in international aid. Unlike over Iraq, I would credit even George W Bush with right intention here. I suppose you could Noam-Chomskyishly argue that the interests of the west might be served by gaining influence over a buffer state between India and China (and, yes, Burma does have oil), but I don't think that's why a US ship is standing off the delta with helicopters and supplies. Proportional means? Yes, air drops and a "sea bridge" for aid would seem proportionate to save the lives of certainly tens of thousands, and potentially hundreds of thousands, of men, women and children....

The responsibility to protect has to be exercised responsibly: that is, with a careful, informed calculation of the likely consequences. I conclude that we should use every means except that of military-backed unilateral - or western "coalition of the willing" - action, which has few reasonable prospects, is arguably not the last resort, and would not have right authority. This does not mean we do nothing. We have a responsibility to act by every other means available, and there are many forms of "intervention' short of the military. (For us ordinary citizens, that includes ensuring the charities that do operate there have sufficient funds. In Britain, one good way to do that is through the multi-charity Disasters Emergency Committee, dec.org.uk.)

(Edited selections via Mick Hartley, via Norm. Emphasis added.)

Especially now that it seems that the aid will get through, it is worth contributing (in Germany, for instance, to Aktion Deutschland Hilft).

And for his other, lesser, service in this piece, I am grateful to Garton Ash for his effort to popularise the word 'Chomskyishly', although -- despite what you might think -- he is not the first to use it.