From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Fri Mar 07 2003 - 11:41:07 MST
--- Lee Corbin <lcorbin@tsoft.com> wrote:
> But the corruption part---that's what's still
> unbelievable.
> I mean, didn't the hard-nosed politicians from their
> home
> countries tell them what was going to happen?
Rules of memetics: if a meme is being promoted by a
faction one sees as The Enemy, one is likely to
invent or adapt memes whose primary purpose is to
counter those, in service to the meta-meme, "We Are
Not The Enemy" - which necessarily implies existence
of and some definition for The Enemy. In this case,
quite a number of the people involved were doing this
to spite said hard-nosed politicians, completely
ignoring their wisdom.
> I'm now starting to wonder if the culture is the
> worst
> part of the problem.
It is, for certain definitions of "culture". Of
course, that can be viewed as a circular argument,
because one can just define "culture" to include
whatever happens to be the worst part of the problem.
But this does apply to certain parts of the definition
that many take for granted - like "anti-Western",
which often means pro-corruption (or at least pro- the
practices which encourage corruption, like valuing the
way things have been done in the past as intrinsically
more important than the way most people today wish to
do things, whether or not corruption is the intended
end result) among other things.
> In the
> countries of
> southeast Asia, and also throughout Latin America, a
> tiny
> percent of people form cliques that totally dominate
> their
> economies---ethnically dominant minorities. In
> Southeast
> Asia, it's the Chinese, and they're resented
> everywhere.
> In Latin America, it's the people with white skins
> that
> run not only the economies, but have all the
> political
> power as well. What I would dearly love to know:
> have
> these economically dominant minorities written the
> laws
> in such a way as to help keep them in control, i.e.,
> to
> deny equal protection?
In the worst cases, yes. In other cases, they don't
have to (or care to) write it into law, so long as
what's enforced has the same effect. For example, in
China, technically just anyone can run for certain
offices, but in practice, anyone too far from the
party line will run into difficulty getting official
support (for instance, not being able to get on the
government-published ballot if you're too critical of
the government). I claim this is a slightly better
case since government officials whose hearts change on
the matter can do the right thing, without having to
go through the formality of having the law changed
(which can be difficult, even perilous, if the
lawmakers' hearts still remain set against change).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Mar 07 2003 - 11:46:47 MST