NP PRC-related

[Doug Millison]

calbert:
ANd though such 
wars have made "weapons merchants rich", I believe that for the 
most part, those wars had political rather than economic origins......

Both/and -- the money flows back and forth, after all; from corporations to
politicians, and from governments to corporations; one hand washes the
other.  I think Pynchon shows the economic origins pretty clearly in GR,
where the War rearranges things so new markets can spring up and the profits
can flow.


 calbert:
WIth the exception of some of the Five Tigers, can you cite any 
western environmental despoliation which compares to the anthrax 
outbreak in Sverdlovsk, or perhaps the cess pools of Poland and 
East Germany? I can only think of Bhopal......and that is an 
exceptional event.....the next worse is probably Sevessi (sp), Italy, 
which endured, and survived a dioxin storm.......

Doug:
I'm not interested in that sort of "they're worse than we are" comparison.
We may not have any control over what happened at an earlier moment in
history, or in some other country, but we -- and I do mean each of us,
individually -- do have a certain degree of choice in our own behavior.  To
the degree to which we can overcome the voice from that Branch Manager in
our heads that Pynchon talks about, that is. 


calbert:
Is it not true, that for a period of time in the 90's pet ownership was 
indeed FORBIDDEN? I recall seeing a story in the Times which 
included a picture of a pet patrol. The story reported that these 
patrols enjoyed the impunity to kill dogs on sight, and included the 
testimony of bereaved former pet owners......

Doug:
I do know that there have been periods, in the 50s and 60s especially, when
pet ownership was condemned as not appropriate for socialist society as the
CCP defined it. In a country which does in fact struggle to feed itself,
it's perhaps not difficult to understand a choice to divert resources to
feed people and not pampered pets. The U.S. could learn a lesson from that,
it seems to me, especially when you have poor people buying pet food because
that's all they can afford in this wonderful capitalist system we've got
here. During those periods China also conducted periodic campaigns to
eradicate rats, mosquitos, and sparrows as disease-carrying pests.

I lived in the PRC from Feb '86 through July'87, in Xian (I visited just
about everywhere worth visiting within a day's drive of Xian) and Beijing,
and traveled in Hong Kong, Hangzhou (in the southeast, not far from
Shanghai), Xining (capital of Qinghai province) and Qinghai Hu (huge salt
lake a daytrip from Xining, where I met yak-herders who treated their dogs
very well) and Ta er si (a huge Tibetan monastery complex near Xining),
Chengdu and Leshan and Emeishan (Sichuan Province).  I saw people with pet
dogs and cats and birds in all of those cities, towns, and rural areas.  On
an earlier visit in 1984, I visited Beijing, Guilin (southwest), Hangzhou,
Huangshan in Anhui Province, Shanghai, and saw pets and owners, too. In 1999
I stayed for a month in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, and Shanghai, and again saw
lots of people with pets.

Just because something's in the Times doesn't automatically mean it's
true...

calbert:
Companies which profit from human misery should be identified and
shunned....

Who are we going to buy our Post Toasties from, then? Rare is the
multinational company that doesn't profit from human misery - and perhaps
that animal doesn't exist.

calbert:
are you willing to look an aggreived parent in the eye 
and tell them they cannot buy that Indian kidney for their dying child?

Yes. Just because you can pay for something doesn't mean that it's right for
you to buy it, or that it's right to permit such trade.