Does anyone have a place to work on spray-painting signs this afternoon? It's too windy here to use my roof with the materials I have. There's a big rally and music this evening, and then the official torch procession is tomorrow.
Please give me a call if you have a location I can use, and/or if you are interested in helping make signs or coming to the protest(s). It's an important cause, and there will definitely be a lot of media attention.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Well, I didn't end up getting a sign made, but I went out with my megaphone and managed to get right up next to the torch procession for a good part of the route. I was briefly interviewed by Tanya Schevitz of the Chronicle, a woman with the San Jose Mercury News, a radio reporter from a CBS station in L.A., and one other person I think was with a media outlet, but so far I haven't found anything specifically mentioning my involvement online.
The eyes of the world were indeed on San Francisco over this torch relay controversy. Tuesday night I saw Richard Gere at the Civic Center rally, and during the torch relay I counted no fewer than *eight* helicopters hovering over the upper Van Ness area. It felt very good to be shouting pro-freedom slogans through the megaphone at a ton of cops, media folks and others with cameras, collaborationist athletes participating in the Olympic torch procession ("Boycott the Olympics! Human rights are more important than a sporting event!"), and a handful of people carrying red and yellow neo-com regime flags, besides all the Tibetans and other protesters, and assorted bystanders. At one point after they'd blocked the approach to the bridge, there were like 100 cops just standing around for half an hour or so, and I mentioned over the megaphone that they were probably each making like $60,000 - $80,000 a year plus overtime, and all this taxpayer money was being spent trying to keep the Chinese regime from being embarrassed by the presence of protesters around the torch. (Not to mention, all the time and effort it must have taken city employees to erect and then remove all the police barriers along the Embarcadero route they didn't even end up using. And the police helicopters, and jetskis and boats that the media reported were out in the bay.
Here are some Tibetan freedom sites and video footage of protests:
http://www.sfteamtibet.org/
http://www.friends-of-tibet.org/
http://studentsforafreetibet.org/article.php?id=1151
http://youtube.com/watch?v=wzao9-BRYxI&feature=related
http://youtube.com/watch?v=65M-gw1UJws&feature=related
http://youtube.com/user/atatataaa
Free Tibet! Free Xinjiang! Free Burma! Free China! Solidarity with the Chinese people, down with the Beijing regime that still has the blood of Tiananmen Square on its hands!
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
With all due respect if we are going to be anything but hypocritical
about this we need to also include this in our talk:
Free the US South to Secede
Return the US Southwest to Mexico
Give Hawaii back to the Hawaiians
Return Alaska to the Alaskan natives
Return Indian lands to the Indians
Close American Military bases in foreign countries...
Etc... etc... etc....
Until those things are done the Chinese are simply not going to take us
seriously about this.
Mike
Mike,
Those are certainly valid points (though where you say "'the Chinese' are not going to take 'us' seriously" I would say that the current regime in Beijing is not going to take its critics seriously). I think that secession is a universally valid principle. And I believe the United States is too large to lend itself to being governed in a libertarian manner, and should be split into multiple countries. Yet I think that we also need to recognize degrees of oppression, and make distinctions between them. Native Hawaiians in Hawaii are not as oppressed as native Tibetans are in Tibet; while recognizing individual and democratic rights in both cases, we should not treat the situations as morally equivalent or equally in need of relief.
It would be nice to have a major private group or groups that maintained a policy of strict independence from any particular nation or jurisdiction and did not let members from particular jurisdictions get involved in any questions involving those jurisdictions, to issue recommendations on various questions of secession and jurisdiction.
In the specific case of Tibet, so long as the Beijing regime insists that Taiwan is part of China, the question might also be raised of putting Tibet under the jurisdiction of Taipei rather than that of Beijing, since the "Chinese" government in Taipei is clearly more legitimate than the Chinese regime in Beijing.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Thanks Starchild...but the government in Beijing is as popular overall
as our government is and about as legitimate. They tax, regulate and
imprison people less than we do here in the good ole USA so it's pretty
hard to claim the high ground. There are no business licenses, no
minimum wage, no payroll tax and no income taxes until some bureaucrat
assigned to the neighborhood sees signs of success....then they come in
and over lunch and probably a little payoff they arrive at a deal and
move on. Compare and contrast that to our Feds, State and locals who are
taking at every step of the way before the business person has made a
nickel.
As far as the legitimacy of the Taiwan government, after living there
off and on for 6 years and speaking at length with the "people", there's
no more love for their government there than that of mainland China and
the pro-China forces just won the last election. Remember, Taiwan got
its power and incredible art collection at the national museum thanks to
the US Navy who escorted Chiang Kai-Shek, his army and his Chinese
plunder to Taiwan where he established himself as a dictator in
conjunction with the Japanese who previously occupied the country and
are a major force even today. Learning Japanese during the time was
mandatory.
My landlord and his friends told me that "nobody on either side of the
straights gives a sh_t about what the authorities say on either side".
They've been trading across the straights since time began and every
fishing boat is a taxi, mail service and freight company. People are
moving freely and trading freely across the straights with families on
both side....not unlike our situation with Mexico despite the "rules".
This last election in Taiwan was finally the reversal of years of the
establishment playing off "independence" with the aboriginal people of
Taiwan who were despised by the Chiang Kai-Shek forces and the Japanese
from the beginning. Only when the establishment discovered the political
possibilities in this approach did they even pay one cent of lip service
to the idea and encouraged the entire "learn the native "Taiwanese"
language of the native people" movement. It was entirely cynical from
the beginning.
What a surprise...government being cynical and posturing for its own
benefit. Gee Wiz
I just want to make sure we are not being silly in advocating for others
what we have completely failed to do here in our own back yard.
Mike
Mike,
*I'm* not personally claiming the high ground -- we're talking about the U.S. government and the Beijing regime, not about ourselves as individual moral agents. Neither authority is "mine" -- I don't have a horse in this fight aside from my disinterested evaluation of the two organizations on their respective records.
If anything, my natural tendency would be a bias against the U.S. government. After all, various government entities in this country, local, state and federal, have violated my rights in many different ways. They are robbing me on an ongoing basis, they prosecuted me for trying to make an honest living, deny me numerous economic and quality of life opportunities through their mounds of crushing regulations and bureaucracy, and are violating or attempting to violate various of my civil liberties.
By contrast, the Chinese regime based in Beijing has negatively impacted *my* life much less. Its authoritarianism mainly affects me, as far as I know, only marginally insofar as it reduces my opportunities for a better life and greater prosperity secondhand via its harsh impositions on the people under its control.
Yet when I compare USgov, against which I have every personal reason to feel animosity, to the regime that rules China, I have little doubt which is preferable in libertarian terms, and which form of political control I would prefer to live under. I think most people make the same judgment, and that this is reflected in the pattern of migration between China and the United States -- almost all of it from the former to the latter and very little the other way around.
You describe the winners of the recent Taiwanese election as "pro-China." Are you sure this is accurate? While I do not have your first-hand experience, my impression as a reader of international news has been that one leading party is more pro-independence, while the other sticks more to the longstanding Kuomintang claim that Taiwan's government is the legitimate government of all China, but that neither is pro-communist or wants to put Taiwan's population under the jurisdiction of the Beijing regime. As to the respective popularity of the authorities in Beijing and Taipei, it was the Beijing regime that has had to bloodily put down a popular uprising in 1989 to maintain its single-party grip on power, while Chiang Kai-Shek's successors instead embraced multiparty democracy. The fact that people in Taiwan complain as much about the authorities that have direct sway over them as do people in China (if this is a fact), is not necessarily a good yardstick for measuring the relative popularity of the two.
Finally, as always, I do not see the government in Washington, D.C., as "ours," nor do I see the United States as "our" backyard. And I don't think our advocacy for the freedom of people in other parts of the world should be held hostage to whether or not we have managed to secure freedom closer to where we live. That would be like admonishing me for being nice to strangers on the grounds that I am not nice to members of my family.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Thanks for your thoughtful and articulate reply Starchild. We take this
for granted from you.
:>)
You made your choices about preferences of political systems based on
what you know and feel comfortable with as Chinese people probably also
"choose". This is not independent freedom analysis issue by issue via
scientific method. But we get your point.
By the way you have no statistics regarding the number of people leaving
Taiwan and moving to the mainland...so the comparison of people moving
to the US is irrelevant in my view.
In the end...we all have to deal with issues close to home. It seems our
agreement with this principle leads to our involvement with the LPSF.
But that also means being realistic about how we lobby for or against
political issues abroad while we have so many problems here. To push
for reform in other cultures when we have such serious problems here at
home is easily dismissed as hypocrisy and is perhaps unproductive.
That's a personal choice...but one I cannot lobby other cultures when
there is so much wrong here. Personally, it embarrasses me to even
suggest it.
But please enjoy the experience....
Mike