So the Wall Is in Good Company…
Help-pakistan.com and their gateway to the blocked blogspot.com.
Administrator :: Jul.14.2006 :: opinion :: No Comments »
Archive for the 'opinion' Category
Newly Found…
What do these domain names have in common?
wikipedia.org
wordpress.com
blogspot.com
udn.com
appledaily.com.tw
chinatimes.com.tw
idn.com.tw
ettoday.com.tw
yam.com (esp. yam.com)
beijing.usembassy.gov (that explains the existence of beijing.usembassy-china.org ?)
newly added: www.nctu.edu.tw , www.books.com.tw , www.wikimedia.org
(oh, actually, google.com can be counted in, although only from time to time)
Administrator :: Jun.21.2006 :: opinion :: No Comments »
China’s First LGBT Hotline Opened in Shanghai
According to Shanghai Youth Daily, China’s first LGBT Hotline is opened in Shanghai. Full text of the coverage can be found here (in Chinese), although the Internet version of the report missed to mention the number: 800-988-1929 (only in the Mainland).
I didn’t know if it’s actually an LGBT Hotline–in China the word tongxinglian is mostly applied to gay male. The “subverted” term tongzhi is not as widely used as in Hong Kong and Taiwan; in China tongzhi still means comrade in most context. And the Youth Daily report only mentioned male callers and male volunteers. Perhaps it’s more a gay hotline than a general LGBT hotline.
Taiwan’s tongzhi hotline is opened in June 1998.
lukhnos :: May.10.2006 :: opinion :: No Comments »
“The World Is Flat”
Read Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. Although Friedman tries the sell the idea (or rather, the slogan) that the world is becoming flat. I tend to see this book as an urge for American to maintain their own superior position in economy, using the means that they once used during the USSR was still there. It’s just that the Russians are replaced here with Indians and Chinese. Friedman seems to over sell too much that we have all already known (Dell’s supply chain and all those flashy-flashy IT bling-bling read soooo dull: we don’t really need an example that’s got repeated over and over again to make his point clear).
Friedman tends to oversimplify the geopolitical issues in the Middle East, and attributes the antagonism towards the developed world a kind of Nietzschean ressentiment (although he never mentions that notion) and in the end he calls for “hope, not looking back” (my paraphrase).
Friedman is a seller of optimism. According to him, imagination opens up a better world. But he fails to mention the worst case scenario. And alas, we all know that even the optimism is not always rosy. In this regard, Ulrich Beck’s What Is Globalization? (Was ist Globalisierung?) and Giddens’s Runaway World may serve a better, “balanced” and more profound reflection on the phenomenon that Friedman tries to repackage under another name.
lukhnos :: Jan.21.2006 :: opinion :: 1 Comment »
Dregs and scum
Two translations exist for the French word racaille (f.): scum and dregs. Although both are used in derogatory language, they actually mean different things. Dregs (collective plural) are “the remnants of a liquid left in a container, together with any sediment or grounds,” whereas scum is “a layer of dirt or froth on the surface of a liquid” (New Oxford American Dictionary). Both are used, sadly, in translating Nicholas Sarkozy’s comment on the recent (and still on-going) riot of Paris suburbs.
lukhnos :: Nov.10.2005 :: opinion :: 3 Comments »
Acting Like a Thief: Kerim’s New Documentary
Kerim Friedman and his wife, Shashwati Talukdar, have recently made a new documentary on the Chhara community, formerly under the British rule labeled as “the criminal tribe,” and their theatre. According to Kerim’s blog:
Acting Like a Thief is a short film about the Budhan Theatre of Chharanagar. Starting with playwright Dakxin Bajrange discussing his arrest , the film brings us inside the lives of a dedicated group of young actors and their families as they discuss what it means to be a “born criminal” and how theater changed their lives.
This film can be downloaded from the film’s official site. And please support their fund-raising campaign that finances their on-going project (of which Acting Like a Thief is a part) !