Monster

This is rich:

"The Dalai Lama is a wolf wrapped in a habit, a monster with human face and the hearf of an animal," said the Chinese leader of Tibet.

Replete with loyalty tests.

Comments

[Marcello]

What do you expect them to say ? Good work and good luck ?
There is nothing to be gained going down the road of ethnic and religious separatism, except feeding the ego of a few thugs and hotheads. Seen that in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. The sooner it is put down, the better.

[James Bowery]

Thugs and hotheads and terrorists, oh my! Seen that in the US Declaration of Independence.

[Marcello]

"Thugs and hotheads and terrorists, oh my! Seen that in the US Declaration of Independence."

This isn't 1776 anymore. What we get these days are the likes of Kosovo, Chechenya the ETA and so on. Not a whole lot of enlightened
Founding Fathers to be found there.

[James Bowery]

And Tibet never was Kosovo, Chechenya or the ETA. I even heard Tibetans have their own ideas about "enlightenment".

There are always variables that anyone can hypothesize are the critical variables that make their case distinguished from the rest. The bottom line is that without consent you are conducting unethical human experimentation, and that is true whether your laboratory is a medical clinic or whether your laboratory is that of the states.

[Marcello]

"The bottom line is that without consent you are conducting unethical human experimentation, and that is true whether your laboratory is a medical clinic or whether your laboratory is that of the states."

Nobody here is running anything resembling an experiment, unless taking note of trends, human nature and historical experience is to be labelled as such.
The matter boils down to a zero sum game between self determination vs territorial integrity. And self determination has given birth to a lot of abortions as of lately.

Given that in 4GW world chaos is the enemy encouraging such tendencies is the equivalent of egging forward the barbarians at the gates.

"I even heard Tibetans have their own ideas about "enlightenment"."

Which seemingly includes going after chinese immigrants to beat them. Typical petty nationalist mindset in action actually but you really have to really stretch relativism to make it pass for anything resembling enlightenment.

[James Bowery]

"Nobody here is running anything resembling an experiment.."

I suppose that if one could point out that Dr. Mengele was not conducting anything resembling a real experiment, it could be used to exempt him from medical ethics since he wasn't really engaged in "human experimentation".

Sorry, all your "zero sum game between self determination and territorial integrity" boils down to is a zero sum game between freedom and tyranny. Yes, people get crazy when they are subjected to tyranny. The solution isn't to stabilize the tyranny but to figure out how to systematize maximal self-determination with territorial reallocation.

Robb's "privatopia" is an approximation, except that it totally supplants any notion of "human rights" with "property rights"

[Walter]

Wow, from zero to Nazi-comparison in only six comments. Bravo, Bowery.

Self-determination is a worthy ideal, enshrined in UN doctrine and the American experience, but surely Marcello is right in pointing out that almost all recent episodes of "self-determination" have not been democratic in either intent or outcome.

Tibetan society has never been democratic. For the vast majority of Tibetans, daily life was fairly hellish for the past, oh, 10,000 years, and has improved considerably in the past 20 or so years. The current crop of Tibetan rebels are not brave democrats hoping to free themselves from tyranny in order to establish a liberal republic. To the extent they have any actual goals, beyond just stirring up trouble and beating random innocent Han bystanders in the streets, those goals do not include democracy. I don't see how there can be any moral imperative to support every ethnic and religious separatist uprising.

One can be opposed to China's human rights violations in Tibet the same way one is opposed to China's human rights violations elsewhere, and such opposition does not equate to or require supporting Tibetan separatism.

Nobody (and I do mean nobody, Tibetans included) would benefit from the disintegration of China.

.

[James Bowery]

"Wow, from zero to Nazi-comparison in only six comments. Bravo, Bowery."

Sarcasm merited. I really shouldn't have insulted the Nazis by comparing them to the sort of world-wide "liberal democracy with minority rights and territorial integrity" supremacy now dominant.

When a law is enacted within such a "liberal democracy" millions of people are subjected to a treatment to which they did not consent -- and almost always with no more scientific justification than Dr. Mengele had for his treatments. The Nazis were choir boys by comparison with the global supremacy of modern "liberal democracy".

[Marcello]

"Yes, people get crazy when they are subjected to tyranny."

Actually, by and large they don't. Most people get along just fine with fascism, communism and company, provided their basic needs are met. My grandparents got along with fascism, as most people then. They liked some things, disliked some others and were generally too busy with their personal lives to think about it too much.
Rest assured that they did not go crazy because of "tyranny" and had it not been for the war dislocation it would have lasted much longer.
I have talked to some people born under soviet rule, same as above. It is certainly not a mystery that USSR nostalgia is a non trivial portion of Putin support.
I bet that most people in the PRC think like that.
Real life isn't like Braveheart movie. Most people don't give a shit about freedom, at the very least it comes well after prosperity and security. Ethnic hate is probably a much more popular idea.

"When a law is enacted within such a "liberal democracy" millions of people are subjected to a treatment to which they did not consent --

The solution isn't to stabilize the tyranny but to figure out how to systematize maximal self-determination with territorial reallocation."

So you would basically redraw borders and move around millions of people every week instead?
And you cannot see the problems with that?
Frankly I am at loss for words.

[James Bowery]

The fact that there many, perhaps most, people will adapt quietly to tyranny doesn't detract from my statement that tyranny makes people crazy. Indeed, if you are a minority suffering under tyranny of the majority then you are virtually guaranteed to see a society predominantly "sane" with a few "crazies" running amok.

As for moving millions of people around, I think you're ignoring the present systems promoting migrations -- not to mention my citation of Robb's "privatopia". At present, the United States itself is being destabilized by a massive flight from diversity, the documentation for which has been available for over 15 years in Peter Brimelow's "Alien Nation" -- dennial of which has led to the current deadlock over immigration starting to take hold over the politics of the western world.

[Marcello]

"doesn't detract from my statement that tyranny makes people crazy."

Actually if we want to get really deep and philosophical a good case could be made that too much freedom makes people crazy, certainly Erich Fromm's work on the matter seems quite convincing in light of my experience with people.
But that is getting a little too far from the original problem, that is the problem of an ethnic minority getting its "freedom"
only to use it to turn its country into a an hell on heart for themselves, the others ethnic groups unfortunate enough to be stuck there and finally creating trouble outside their postage stamp republic.

In regards to immigration nowadays by and large it is driven by economic imperatives and as such has jack and shit to do with submission to tyranny, majority, law, self determination (in a wilsonian sense), freedom or any such bullshit. Saudi Arabia has six millions of immigrants for example and I don't think that freedom was what got them there. If anything this makes the whole self determination crap even more difficult as Tibet (for example) has now a large chinese population which will be at the mercy of tibetan violence if the PRC decamps, forcing them to leave all at once and with great dislocation (being a serb in kosovo or a russian in chechenya in the early 90's was no fun).

As a matter of fact when
I hear "systematize maximal self-determination with territorial reallocation"
I can't hel but think about the Partition of India, which is one of the things I had in mind when I wrote about redrawing borders and moving millions. The death toll of that was at least half a million, real fun indeed.

[James Bowery]

From the Amazon book review of "Terror and Consent":

"At stake is whether we can maintain states of consent in the twenty-first century or whether the dominant constitutional order will be that of states of terror."

When you have upwards of 80% of the population opposing the mass immigration policies being foisted upon them by market dominant minorities in the name of "economic imperatives" and then being told this is "consent" and to oppose it is tantamount to "moving millions... death toll that was at least a half million..." it is hard to see how this is going to get resolves short of the collapse of the structures that support such insolence.

[James Bowery]

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/from_1998_ieee_usa_harris_poll_us_public_overwhelmingly_opposed_to_h_1b_vis/

[James Bowery]

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/ethnic_intellectual_property_theft_and_the_decline_of_civilizations/