I had no idea about this, but on the other hand, I'm not really surprised. I'm fairly certain Scientology, and a lot of new religious movements/cults/whatever, are pretty stiffly banned in China, especially does of foreign origins. Meanwhile in Taiwan, there's pretty much zero constraints to religious movements. The Falun Gong own a television channel on cable TV, the New Tang Dynasty TV Channel, whose sole purpose, as far as I can tell, is to broadcast anti-Chinese propaganda of widely varying degrees of historical accuracy accompanied by scary music (their turn around on the USSR--from hatred of Moscow as a Chinese ally, then their fond embrace of the Soviets as a Chinese enemy, is frankly hilarious). These new groups can do pretty much whatever they like in Taiwan, so it's not that surprising that Scientology would find it an attractive recruiting ground.
There's still free Scientology papers for distribution around subways in Washington DC. Its creepy that Scientology has fled to Asia like a tobacco company.
If there's money to be made elsewhere, they will find a way to hold on and rebrand in a new cultural setting. It works for other religious groups and smaller Christian sects in Asia after all.
Almost the precise same thing happened in the new wave Christian churches around the time I was born--most of those fizzled out and ended up absorbed into the general Christian minority though.
I'm not really worried, so long as they don't buy their own television station.
You say that shit now, but what if they make another John Travolta Battlefield Earth movie?
I had no idea about this, but on the other hand, I'm not really surprised. I'm fairly certain Scientology, and a lot of new religious movements/cults/whatever, are pretty stiffly banned in China, especially does of foreign origins. Meanwhile in Taiwan, there's pretty much zero constraints to religious movements. The Falun Gong own a television channel on cable TV, the New Tang Dynasty TV Channel, whose sole purpose, as far as I can tell, is to broadcast anti-Chinese propaganda of widely varying degrees of historical accuracy accompanied by scary music (their turn around on the USSR--from hatred of Moscow as a Chinese ally, then their fond embrace of the Soviets as a Chinese enemy, is frankly hilarious). These new groups can do pretty much whatever they like in Taiwan, so it's not that surprising that Scientology would find it an attractive recruiting ground.
There's still free Scientology papers for distribution around subways in Washington DC. Its creepy that Scientology has fled to Asia like a tobacco company.
If there's money to be made elsewhere, they will find a way to hold on and rebrand in a new cultural setting. It works for other religious groups and smaller Christian sects in Asia after all.
Almost the precise same thing happened in the new wave Christian churches around the time I was born--most of those fizzled out and ended up absorbed into the general Christian minority though.
I'm not really worried, so long as they don't buy their own television station.
You say that shit now, but what if they make another John Travolta Battlefield Earth movie?
I'm pretty sure I've survived through at least one New Tang Dynasty box office production.
It may or may not have involved an elaborate dance number in traditional Qing-style dress and staging.
Honestly, Taiwan has so many bizarre cults that Scientology just kind of blends in. I'm more concerned about those "mainstream" Christian sects that are beginning to flex their muscles in politics now that gay marriage has become more than a remote possibility.
Honestly, Taiwan has so many bizarre cults that Scientology just kind of blends in. I'm more concerned about those "mainstream" Christian sects that are beginning to flex their muscles in politics now that gay marriage has become more than a remote possibility.
There was a time where my conservative, secular-born self was mildly worried about the rising popularity of Christianity--mostly in the late 1990s, when every other politician running for office seemed to have a Christian name that they used on the ticket. I was also a less-worldly teenager. Even the Kuomintang chairman calls himself "Eric" even though I don't think he's Christian. Apparently I wasn't the only one because in the decade that followed, there was sort of a public reaction to political Christianity, with DPP and KMT politicians relying more on temples for political rallies, and flexing some Buddhist muscle on the grassroot levels.
Now that heyday is over. Any new Christian movements pretty much just have to work with that 4% they have already, and the less conventional they are, the more likely they are to be scorned by both the Christians that came before and the larger Chinese philosophies, Buddhism, and the atheists like myself. Meanwhile, as I mentioned before both the DPP and the Kuomintang have legislators trying to seize the initiative on Gay Marriage (probably to ensure they're not left in the dust when it does pass). Both parties have their conservative wings (if you don't believe the DPP does, you obviously weren't in Taiwan before 2008, when the DPP's love affair with conservative politics led to a very nasty breakup), but I don't think they're going to stick their necks out to die on that hill. Taiwanese Christians definitely are the most likely to oppose a new marriage law, but there's not much they can do about it. Pres. Tsai would look extremely hypocritical if she turned the initiative around, and the KMT's public face, like Jason Hsu, already say they'll support it on their end.
The Chinese have arrested a Japanese citizen who was visiting the country. Current estimate is that it is suspicion of espionage. Not the first one either but this one is showing up in the news.
Pres. Tsai, it's worth noting, is the first Taiwanese president to have a aboriginal grandparent (one of her grandparents is Paiwan, the second largest of the country's aboriginal communities).
The latest twist: A prominent associate of the defendants, Wang Yu, emerged from detention Monday for the first time in a year to blame “foreign groups” for instilling ideas of democracy among her legal colleagues. The statement comes on the eve of a major subversion trial.
“I am Chinese and I only accept the leadership of the Chinese government,” Ms. Wang is seen saying in a videotaped interview aired on ONTV, a website affiliated with Oriental Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper She is also seen denouncing Zhou Shifeng, director of the prominent Fengrui law firm, which has been a key target of Beijing’s assault on rights advocates.
I've never understood the point of the CPC extracting these obviously forced confessions. Surely they're not fooling anyone. Even allowing that mainlanders may not have read or heard of 1984, I don't think you need a degree in totalitarian studies to figure out what's going on. Why don't they just shoot the dissidents they abduct and hide the bodies? This just makes them look like childish thugs, and occasionally the victims recant (well, if they're from Hong Kong, anyway).
The latest twist: A prominent associate of the defendants, Wang Yu, emerged from detention Monday for the first time in a year to blame “foreign groups” for instilling ideas of democracy among her legal colleagues. The statement comes on the eve of a major subversion trial.
“I am Chinese and I only accept the leadership of the Chinese government,” Ms. Wang is seen saying in a videotaped interview aired on ONTV, a website affiliated with Oriental Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper She is also seen denouncing Zhou Shifeng, director of the prominent Fengrui law firm, which has been a key target of Beijing’s assault on rights advocates.
I've never understood the point of the CPC extracting these obviously forced confessions. Surely they're not fooling anyone. Even allowing that mainlanders may not have read or heard of 1984, I don't think you need a degree in totalitarian studies to figure out what's going on. Why don't they just shoot the dissidents they abduct and hide the bodies? This just makes them look like childish thugs, and occasionally the victims recant (well, if they're from Hong Kong, anyway).
Because it wouldn't stay a secret. And killing them is a much more effective way of martyring them.
The Emperor made a speech hinting at abdication today. This is big because he cannot according to current law so this was a round about way of asking for the change of the law, which he cannot even ask for legally since that is interfering in the ruling of the country. Abe said he will think deeply about it. Still this is a big thing.
The latest twist: A prominent associate of the defendants, Wang Yu, emerged from detention Monday for the first time in a year to blame “foreign groups” for instilling ideas of democracy among her legal colleagues. The statement comes on the eve of a major subversion trial.
“I am Chinese and I only accept the leadership of the Chinese government,” Ms. Wang is seen saying in a videotaped interview aired on ONTV, a website affiliated with Oriental Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper She is also seen denouncing Zhou Shifeng, director of the prominent Fengrui law firm, which has been a key target of Beijing’s assault on rights advocates.
I've never understood the point of the CPC extracting these obviously forced confessions. Surely they're not fooling anyone. Even allowing that mainlanders may not have read or heard of 1984, I don't think you need a degree in totalitarian studies to figure out what's going on. Why don't they just shoot the dissidents they abduct and hide the bodies? This just makes them look like childish thugs, and occasionally the victims recant (well, if they're from Hong Kong, anyway).
Because it wouldn't stay a secret. And killing them is a much more effective way of martyring them.
It doesn't have to stay a secret, they just have to not talk about it. Or they can stick the prisoners in a gulag. I just don't think martyrdom does a whole lot in modern Chinese culture. They made a bunch of martyrs at Tiananmen Square, and by and large the Chinese in the US that I know are on board with the CPC on that, especially if they're from Beijing.
In any case, what's the confession good for? The CPC can just torture them and say that they were arrested and gently punished for crimes against the state or whatever. The confession just seems like a bad joke.
The Emperor made a speech hinting at abdication today. This is big because he cannot according to current law so this was a round about way of asking for the change of the law, which he cannot even ask for legally since that is interfering in the ruling of the country. Abe said he will think deeply about it. Still this is a big thing.
The Emperor made a speech hinting at abdication today. This is big because he cannot according to current law so this was a round about way of asking for the change of the law, which he cannot even ask for legally since that is interfering in the ruling of the country. Abe said he will think deeply about it. Still this is a big thing.
He has pretty much been emperor-at-gunpoint for a while now I think. He tried abdicating a while ago and was shot down.
A great many constitutional monarchs are, apparently--their public faces aside, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that it's a miserable position, even in those fun-loving Scandinavian monarchies. Princess Diana, renown for her humanitarian work as much as anything, was a sad example of it prior to her passing. Though at least earlier this century, if not today, British monarchs had a way out.
On the subject of Taiwan, the SCS Ruling from the Hague has had a lot of pundits and commentators contorting themselves how to reconcile the fact that 1) Taiwan should be an ally to stop the spread of Chinese influence (and infrastructure/island expansion) in the South China Sea, and the resultant de facto, if not de jure, economic zones with the unpleasant reality that 2) the overwhelming majority of Taiwanese who have an opinion (a lot don't because we are, in fact, humans obsessed with our petty lives) on the matter are overwhelmingly opposed to ruling and 3) the Taiwanese military has already put a huge amount of investment into Taiping Island, to which could probably only be removed via military force which no one wants, for the very specific reason of guaranteeing economic rights and 4) any Taipei government that backs down on Taiping, either practically or on principle, will be committing suicide because of that whole inconvenient "democracy" thing.
It's pretty funny to watch (maybe in a schadenfreude kind of way). If you want a laugh, you can read Gerrit van der Wees try and sell an increasingly antsy Taiwanese public on how the SCS is actually really good for Taiwan--provided they 1) ignore certain parts of it to retain Taiping Island's far-reaching military purposes, like for humanitarian rescue 2) pay attention to other parts of it to use it to erode the overall Chinese claim on Taiwanese sovereignty (so we just have to deal with the whole "civil war" and "Republic of China" part, lol) and 3) apparently give up economic rights like fishing and play ball with Team ASEAN.
I understand the attraction--US leadership combined with a united ASEAN front could check Chinese advancement. But this article is such a bad sell to the Taiwanese government and public I had to laugh. He might as well have just said, "Goddamn it Taiwan! Shit's getting real here! Give up your fucking island rock already, put on your Jersey, and come play ball!" as though the other players have all the solutions to Taiwan's sovereignty claims in their back pockets, like Donald Trump's magical plan to get American winning again.
In reality, Taiwan isn't going to agree with all ASEAN positions in East Asia. It's just the nature of the beast. This is one of those cases. And there is a good, difficult argument to be made that Taiwan should accept the ruling's penalties, but this definitely isn't it.
There's been a leak with a few thousand internal reports from Nauru, the island where Australia puts immigrants. To everyones surprise there might be a few problems.
The fact that the Communist Party felt the need to temper the public's response is extremely concerning to me. In a country that's going to have a severe demographic imbalance in a few years, both in terms of age and gender, if even they feel like nationalism is starting to get a little out of hand....
I don't think it's a new thing. The Communist Party has always been sensitive about popular movements gaining an independent life of their own. Their interests might align for now, but if some day they're no longer at war with Eurasia it's not good to have an established group dedicated to a contrary position. They've always liked to keep any nationalist expression that isn't specifically "Long live the glorious CPC" to a low simmer.
Old populations are a stabilizing force, usually. It's the unattached young men that spell trouble.
It's a strange combination that probably doesn't happen that often in history, since it bucks two trends: there are going to be fewer young people than old people, because of the One Child policy, and there are going to be many more men than women, because of sex-selection resulting from the One Child policy. My worry is that the decline in the number of working people is going to cause an economic decline, the high proportion of seniors is going to stretch government budgets, and then China's going to have many unmarried men who are also short on economic prospects, combined with a fervent nationalism towards pretty much all their neighbours, with whom they have existing border frictions, and we have a pretty nasty recipe for global conflict, whether internal or external (or both).
The CPC's demonstrated remarkable prescience in managing China's political tensions for decades now, so I hope they have plans for managing the situation, but a lot of China's neighbours are trying to cozy up to the Americans right now.
In Taiwan, a new public campaign for United Nations membership is gradually getting underway. This is pretty normal--the Chen government after 2000 eventually pursued the same, but even consistently Green voters acknowledged the public face of the campaign was so badly bungled (especially the television advertising) that it was doomed to fail even if it wasn't a particularly lofty goal. Plus, as with NATO and ASEAN, the UN doesn't like whiners and the campaign took on a distinctly factual but whining tone about the unfairness of the situation.
The campaign under Pres. Tsai will probably be quite different in tone, but it's hard to say if it'll actually make any headway (especially since the mechanical details still need to be decided by Taipei for any such application). Taipei will probably take a two-front approach: the obligatory formal application process, as in the past, and then trying to strength cooperation with UN agencies, as the previous Ma government focused on after the failures under the Chen Presidency.
SEOUL, South Korea — A North Korean ballistic missile fired from a submarine Wednesday flew about 500 kilometers (310 miles) in the longest flight by that type of weapon, Seoul officials said, a range that can place much of South Korea within its striking distance.
Seoul officials condemned the launch as an "armed protest" against the start of annual South Korean-U.S. military drills that North Korean calls an invasion rehearsal. The launch was also the latest in a series of missile, rocket and other weapon tests by North Korea, which is openly pushing to acquire a reliable weapon capable striking targets as far away as the continental U.S.
The missile fired from a submarine off the eastern North Korean coastal town of Sinpo landed in waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan, according to a statement from South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff. The U.S. Strategic Command said it tracked the North Korean submarine launch of the presumed KN-11 missile into the Sea of Japan.
The 500-kilometer distance is longer than ones recorded by other submarine-launched missiles launched by North Korea, and puts most of South Korea within its range if it is fired near the border, although North Korea already has a variety of land-based missiles that can strike South Korea and Japan.
North Korea fired two missiles from submarines earlier this year but South Korean defense officials believe they exploded in midair after flying fewer than 30 kilometers (18 miles).
You need to build, maintain, and crew a good number of attack subs for them to matter. You only need 1 boomer.
NK only has a few old Russian ballistic subs, and they were all old when they bought them. Now the north koreans can barely run or maintain them. It's hardly a good sign to see them successfully firing a missile from one, but on the other hand it was apparently fired not far out from port and frankly that's probably about as far out as the North Koreans want to sail it. And their subs are only getting older.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Additionally, North Korea has been living under the umbrella of possible nuclear retaliation for more than a half-century now. The American ability to subject them to nuclear bombardment eclipses their ability to do the same to the United States (or for that matter, Japan or South Korea) the way a skyscraper eclipses a telephone booth.
It's always upsetting when a country enters the "nuclear club", but then life goes on. It's easy to forget that when India tested the Smiling Buddha successfully in 1974, Indira Gandhi was widely labeled a Soviet puppet and an American enemy (or at the very least an enemy of American allies like Pakistan). The US, Canada, Japan and China slammed India with economic sanctions--as with sanctions to North Korea, they did very little to deter the country in question.
Granted, India is not the same as North Korea, but its government was very unpopular in the United States at the time. But short of military action, there's very little that can be done to an already marginalized country--developing missile submarines is just another facet of that already existing reality, I'd argue.
From a diesel submarine. Which I'll once again stress is utterly pointless in this day and age. It's virtually as effective as just launching from land.
Diesel subs are still viable for coastal defence but as power projection they're a joke.
From a diesel submarine. Which I'll once again stress is utterly pointless in this day and age. It's virtually as effective as just launching from land.
Diesel subs are still viable for coastal defence but as power projection they're a joke.
ok, sure. but the article states that even their crappy sub can still strike the majority of SK right?
They can strike the majority of South Korea with their missiles already. Their longest range missile is ~1,500 miles last I checked and they generally don't have much trouble shooting it from land.
This actually presents an interesting paradox in our (and generally speaking, 'western') perceptions on North Korean. On one hand, we like to describe it as a joke of a nation, like something out of The Onion, while on the other hand, we derive clear utility from it being represented as a bogeyman-slash-James Bond villain country. Invariably, these two conflicting images occasionally brush up against eachother.
Since the "end" of the famine (or at least the worst part of it prior to 2000), North Korea has cemented itself as the most militarized nation on Earth--per capita (the part of that statement that is apparently always unspoken) within the context of a country with a population of 24 million people (half of South Korea, less than a quarter of Japan and coincidentally, slightly more than Taiwan). This isn't a new development--and it came through the shared geography of the Korean peninsula and decades of acquisition of completely conventional, completely legal (within any reasonable definition) military hardware combined with an abrupt re-appraisal of Pyongyang's political objectives with the end of the Cold War (combined with the continued military partnership between the ROK and the USA, and the continued presence of American troops).
North Korea isn't accounting for 50% of world military expenditures--the partner of neighbor it's engaged in a ceasefire is. North Korea is not, reasonably, in the top 15. That doesn't mean North Korea is not any potential threat, but it does mean that Pyongyang's military capabilities do not radically change in regards to all of its well-armed neighbors. Even North Korea becoming a formal nuclear power is a slow, gradual process next to the United States (which is possibly second, but likely tied, or surpassed, to Russia with 1,800 active warheads--actual numbers are difficult to obtain and out of date).
This doesn't mean we should ignore North Korea's international hostility. Sporadic violence on the border, threats exchanged with the South Korean border forces and navy, and obviously the kidnapping of Japanese and Korean nationals presents a serious problem.
This particular development, while perhaps unfortunate or aggravating, doesn't do much to change the status quo--Pyongyang was already capable of belligerently threatening its neighbors if it so desired, and already at threat of retaliation for such behavior--with the possible exception that the most basic SLBM capability would potentially make an invasion of North Korea more difficult. And personally I'm opposed to that for a variety of reasons (though that's another topic entirely). If you're going to worry about one or two SLBM, or five or ten inactive nuclear warheads, you can't just brush aside the +700 artillery pieces the KPA has that can hit metropolitan Seoul, or the apparent +1 million active duty personnel in uniform (ranked fifth in the world--which is horrifying until you realize it's behind both China and the United States, after which it's less horrifying). I'd argue those, unlike a prototype SLBM program, are available for Pyongyang right now and potentially as dangerous, if not more so, to the actual people North Korea can threaten.
If you're an American, I really don't think this new development is something to lose sleep over unless you were part of some secret task force set up by the Bush or Obama governments to topple the Pyongyang government and cripple the Korean People's Army. Which no one here probably is, even if such a thing existed. If you're South Korean, there's a stronger case for concern, but I think it remains secondary to the tense situation on the border, the potential belligerence between Korean warships, and--as always--the kidnappings (remember, the ROK uses male mobilization, so potentially any young man might be sent to the border for his service time).
Then again, when I was a conscript in the ROC Army, I didn't lose sleep over China. I lost sleep over the possibility of breaking my legs in an on-base accident, during exercises, or something equally stupid. I could be letting my experience cloud my judgment.
You need to build, maintain, and crew a good number of attack subs for them to matter. You only need 1 boomer.
NK only has a few old Russian ballistic subs, and they were all old when they bought them. Now the north koreans can barely run or maintain them. It's hardly a good sign to see them successfully firing a missile from one, but on the other hand it was apparently fired not far out from port and frankly that's probably about as far out as the North Koreans want to sail it. And their subs are only getting older.
That would be the Project 629 diesel-propelled missile submarine, called "Golf" by NATO, the only class of such vessel Russia has exported to my knowledge (and was never exported in the USSR, with a lone exception of designs delivered to China in 1959, who built one model themselves and still operate it as a testing platform). With American approval (as I remember it) the Yeltsin government sold ten to be scrapped to North Korea in 1993, but exactly what happened to them is unclear--originally they were supposed to be scrapped by the Russian government and then delivered, but considering the Russian government was literally firing on itself in 1993, apparently some steps got skipped.
On a related note, this might be a good place for people who have experience with this sort of thing - my future wife is Filipino. I see that we can instantly get a visa for her mother once she gets her US citizenship (and then correspondingly, her siblings could get fast-tracked only if/when her mother gains citizenship). Is there any way to sponsor members of her family to help them immigrate, as a US citizen myself?
On a related note, this might be a good place for people who have experience with this sort of thing - my future wife is Filipino. I see that we can instantly get a visa for her mother once she gets her US citizenship (and then correspondingly, her siblings could get fast-tracked only if/when her mother gains citizenship). Is there any way to sponsor members of her family to help them immigrate, as a US citizen myself?
US visas and immigration rules are a mess, so I would advise you to talk to a lawyer. It's expensive, but a good immigration lawyer will make the immigration process much easier.
Posts
You say that shit now, but what if they make another John Travolta Battlefield Earth movie?
I'm pretty sure I've survived through at least one New Tang Dynasty box office production.
It may or may not have involved an elaborate dance number in traditional Qing-style dress and staging.
There was a time where my conservative, secular-born self was mildly worried about the rising popularity of Christianity--mostly in the late 1990s, when every other politician running for office seemed to have a Christian name that they used on the ticket. I was also a less-worldly teenager. Even the Kuomintang chairman calls himself "Eric" even though I don't think he's Christian. Apparently I wasn't the only one because in the decade that followed, there was sort of a public reaction to political Christianity, with DPP and KMT politicians relying more on temples for political rallies, and flexing some Buddhist muscle on the grassroot levels.
Now that heyday is over. Any new Christian movements pretty much just have to work with that 4% they have already, and the less conventional they are, the more likely they are to be scorned by both the Christians that came before and the larger Chinese philosophies, Buddhism, and the atheists like myself. Meanwhile, as I mentioned before both the DPP and the Kuomintang have legislators trying to seize the initiative on Gay Marriage (probably to ensure they're not left in the dust when it does pass). Both parties have their conservative wings (if you don't believe the DPP does, you obviously weren't in Taiwan before 2008, when the DPP's love affair with conservative politics led to a very nasty breakup), but I don't think they're going to stick their necks out to die on that hill. Taiwanese Christians definitely are the most likely to oppose a new marriage law, but there's not much they can do about it. Pres. Tsai would look extremely hypocritical if she turned the initiative around, and the KMT's public face, like Jason Hsu, already say they'll support it on their end.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-china-idUSKCN10A04F?il=0
Pres. Tsai, it's worth noting, is the first Taiwanese president to have a aboriginal grandparent (one of her grandparents is Paiwan, the second largest of the country's aboriginal communities).
The rival Kuomintang's four aboriginal lawmakers, as well as MP Kao Chin Su-mei (from the Nonpartisan Solidarity Union), from the Highland Aboriginal electoral district, did not attend on the basis that Tsai's predecessors, including Pres. Ma, had already given informal apologies to the community over the same issues. Likewise, several aboriginal rights groups intend to protest over grievances in front of the President's Office.
I've never understood the point of the CPC extracting these obviously forced confessions. Surely they're not fooling anyone. Even allowing that mainlanders may not have read or heard of 1984, I don't think you need a degree in totalitarian studies to figure out what's going on. Why don't they just shoot the dissidents they abduct and hide the bodies? This just makes them look like childish thugs, and occasionally the victims recant (well, if they're from Hong Kong, anyway).
Because it wouldn't stay a secret. And killing them is a much more effective way of martyring them.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/08/489138579/in-rare-speech-japans-emperor-hints-at-abdicating
It doesn't have to stay a secret, they just have to not talk about it. Or they can stick the prisoners in a gulag. I just don't think martyrdom does a whole lot in modern Chinese culture. They made a bunch of martyrs at Tiananmen Square, and by and large the Chinese in the US that I know are on board with the CPC on that, especially if they're from Beijing.
In any case, what's the confession good for? The CPC can just torture them and say that they were arrested and gently punished for crimes against the state or whatever. The confession just seems like a bad joke.
He has pretty much been emperor-at-gunpoint for a while now I think. He tried abdicating a while ago and was shot down.
A great many constitutional monarchs are, apparently--their public faces aside, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that it's a miserable position, even in those fun-loving Scandinavian monarchies. Princess Diana, renown for her humanitarian work as much as anything, was a sad example of it prior to her passing. Though at least earlier this century, if not today, British monarchs had a way out.
On the subject of Taiwan, the SCS Ruling from the Hague has had a lot of pundits and commentators contorting themselves how to reconcile the fact that 1) Taiwan should be an ally to stop the spread of Chinese influence (and infrastructure/island expansion) in the South China Sea, and the resultant de facto, if not de jure, economic zones with the unpleasant reality that 2) the overwhelming majority of Taiwanese who have an opinion (a lot don't because we are, in fact, humans obsessed with our petty lives) on the matter are overwhelmingly opposed to ruling and 3) the Taiwanese military has already put a huge amount of investment into Taiping Island, to which could probably only be removed via military force which no one wants, for the very specific reason of guaranteeing economic rights and 4) any Taipei government that backs down on Taiping, either practically or on principle, will be committing suicide because of that whole inconvenient "democracy" thing.
It's pretty funny to watch (maybe in a schadenfreude kind of way). If you want a laugh, you can read Gerrit van der Wees try and sell an increasingly antsy Taiwanese public on how the SCS is actually really good for Taiwan--provided they 1) ignore certain parts of it to retain Taiping Island's far-reaching military purposes, like for humanitarian rescue 2) pay attention to other parts of it to use it to erode the overall Chinese claim on Taiwanese sovereignty (so we just have to deal with the whole "civil war" and "Republic of China" part, lol) and 3) apparently give up economic rights like fishing and play ball with Team ASEAN.
I understand the attraction--US leadership combined with a united ASEAN front could check Chinese advancement. But this article is such a bad sell to the Taiwanese government and public I had to laugh. He might as well have just said, "Goddamn it Taiwan! Shit's getting real here! Give up your fucking island rock already, put on your Jersey, and come play ball!" as though the other players have all the solutions to Taiwan's sovereignty claims in their back pockets, like Donald Trump's magical plan to get American winning again.
In reality, Taiwan isn't going to agree with all ASEAN positions in East Asia. It's just the nature of the beast. This is one of those cases. And there is a good, difficult argument to be made that Taiwan should accept the ruling's penalties, but this definitely isn't it.
https://theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/10/the-nauru-files-2000-leaked-reports-reveal-scale-of-abuse-of-children-in-australian-offshore-detention
It's a strange combination that probably doesn't happen that often in history, since it bucks two trends: there are going to be fewer young people than old people, because of the One Child policy, and there are going to be many more men than women, because of sex-selection resulting from the One Child policy. My worry is that the decline in the number of working people is going to cause an economic decline, the high proportion of seniors is going to stretch government budgets, and then China's going to have many unmarried men who are also short on economic prospects, combined with a fervent nationalism towards pretty much all their neighbours, with whom they have existing border frictions, and we have a pretty nasty recipe for global conflict, whether internal or external (or both).
The CPC's demonstrated remarkable prescience in managing China's political tensions for decades now, so I hope they have plans for managing the situation, but a lot of China's neighbours are trying to cozy up to the Americans right now.
I have to agree with them on that. You don't outsource your national power grid to anyone.
Abbott might have
I have a sneaking suspicion that xenophobia and nationalism would have beaten glorious capitalism smashing state run enterprise. Not by much mind you.
The campaign under Pres. Tsai will probably be quite different in tone, but it's hard to say if it'll actually make any headway (especially since the mechanical details still need to be decided by Taipei for any such application). Taipei will probably take a two-front approach: the obligatory formal application process, as in the past, and then trying to strength cooperation with UN agencies, as the previous Ma government focused on after the failures under the Chen Presidency.
Fuck Fuck Fuck.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
NK only has a few old Russian ballistic subs, and they were all old when they bought them. Now the north koreans can barely run or maintain them. It's hardly a good sign to see them successfully firing a missile from one, but on the other hand it was apparently fired not far out from port and frankly that's probably about as far out as the North Koreans want to sail it. And their subs are only getting older.
It's always upsetting when a country enters the "nuclear club", but then life goes on. It's easy to forget that when India tested the Smiling Buddha successfully in 1974, Indira Gandhi was widely labeled a Soviet puppet and an American enemy (or at the very least an enemy of American allies like Pakistan). The US, Canada, Japan and China slammed India with economic sanctions--as with sanctions to North Korea, they did very little to deter the country in question.
Granted, India is not the same as North Korea, but its government was very unpopular in the United States at the time. But short of military action, there's very little that can be done to an already marginalized country--developing missile submarines is just another facet of that already existing reality, I'd argue.
You need one quiet boomer. Never mind the inherent range limitation of diesel submarines.
@Kana NK has their own SSB that they've developed. That's presumably what this was launched from.
and yet they can launch a ballistic missile from what they have.
Diesel subs are still viable for coastal defence but as power projection they're a joke.
ok, sure. but the article states that even their crappy sub can still strike the majority of SK right?
Since the "end" of the famine (or at least the worst part of it prior to 2000), North Korea has cemented itself as the most militarized nation on Earth--per capita (the part of that statement that is apparently always unspoken) within the context of a country with a population of 24 million people (half of South Korea, less than a quarter of Japan and coincidentally, slightly more than Taiwan). This isn't a new development--and it came through the shared geography of the Korean peninsula and decades of acquisition of completely conventional, completely legal (within any reasonable definition) military hardware combined with an abrupt re-appraisal of Pyongyang's political objectives with the end of the Cold War (combined with the continued military partnership between the ROK and the USA, and the continued presence of American troops).
North Korea isn't accounting for 50% of world military expenditures--the partner of neighbor it's engaged in a ceasefire is. North Korea is not, reasonably, in the top 15. That doesn't mean North Korea is not any potential threat, but it does mean that Pyongyang's military capabilities do not radically change in regards to all of its well-armed neighbors. Even North Korea becoming a formal nuclear power is a slow, gradual process next to the United States (which is possibly second, but likely tied, or surpassed, to Russia with 1,800 active warheads--actual numbers are difficult to obtain and out of date).
This doesn't mean we should ignore North Korea's international hostility. Sporadic violence on the border, threats exchanged with the South Korean border forces and navy, and obviously the kidnapping of Japanese and Korean nationals presents a serious problem.
This particular development, while perhaps unfortunate or aggravating, doesn't do much to change the status quo--Pyongyang was already capable of belligerently threatening its neighbors if it so desired, and already at threat of retaliation for such behavior--with the possible exception that the most basic SLBM capability would potentially make an invasion of North Korea more difficult. And personally I'm opposed to that for a variety of reasons (though that's another topic entirely). If you're going to worry about one or two SLBM, or five or ten inactive nuclear warheads, you can't just brush aside the +700 artillery pieces the KPA has that can hit metropolitan Seoul, or the apparent +1 million active duty personnel in uniform (ranked fifth in the world--which is horrifying until you realize it's behind both China and the United States, after which it's less horrifying). I'd argue those, unlike a prototype SLBM program, are available for Pyongyang right now and potentially as dangerous, if not more so, to the actual people North Korea can threaten.
If you're an American, I really don't think this new development is something to lose sleep over unless you were part of some secret task force set up by the Bush or Obama governments to topple the Pyongyang government and cripple the Korean People's Army. Which no one here probably is, even if such a thing existed. If you're South Korean, there's a stronger case for concern, but I think it remains secondary to the tense situation on the border, the potential belligerence between Korean warships, and--as always--the kidnappings (remember, the ROK uses male mobilization, so potentially any young man might be sent to the border for his service time).
Then again, when I was a conscript in the ROC Army, I didn't lose sleep over China. I lost sleep over the possibility of breaking my legs in an on-base accident, during exercises, or something equally stupid. I could be letting my experience cloud my judgment.
That would be the Project 629 diesel-propelled missile submarine, called "Golf" by NATO, the only class of such vessel Russia has exported to my knowledge (and was never exported in the USSR, with a lone exception of designs delivered to China in 1959, who built one model themselves and still operate it as a testing platform). With American approval (as I remember it) the Yeltsin government sold ten to be scrapped to North Korea in 1993, but exactly what happened to them is unclear--originally they were supposed to be scrapped by the Russian government and then delivered, but considering the Russian government was literally firing on itself in 1993, apparently some steps got skipped.
I had not realized that things in the Philippines had gone this downhill.
Jesus.
Edit: To spell the guy's name right.
US visas and immigration rules are a mess, so I would advise you to talk to a lawyer. It's expensive, but a good immigration lawyer will make the immigration process much easier.