Ah, thanks for that link - I do appreciate it. But I don't think the Green Party are not 'participants' - perhaps my wording was a bit too strong. I just think that fielding a Presidential candidate in and of itself is just not worth the time as things currently stand. The Greens have about 135 elected positions in a country of 325 million people, no seats in either the House or the Senate, no seats in state legislative systems, no governships, and no real power in any singular state besides a few mayoral positions. That does not a movement make, and I think that's what I was trying to get at.

I'd look to the Lib Dems in the UK, Podemos in Spain, the New Democrats in Canada, or, hell even the Green Party in Australia/UK to an extent (at least they have a seat in Parliament...) to how to actually build a relatively successful movement in a two party system - the Greens are adopting more populist stances, and I like that, and I truly want to see a real anti-capitalist, progressive party in the States, but nothing the Greens have done shows me that they are willing to put in the years of groundwork to start capturing more than 130 meager local offices.

I also understand that it's hard as shit to break the duopoly here in the US but I don't really think the Greens have taken the right approach to do so. I mean, the Liberfuckingtarian Party has more power than them in terms of seats/offices. That's ludicrous.

I love Corbyn in the UK (though he still has a long way to go to try and challenge the strangehold the Tories have in England in particular) and one of the keys to his success has been creating a mass party-movement - energizing people to join the Party as card-carrying, dues-paying members, challenging them to take on MPs that they are unhappy with them, rallying them to get involved. And now Labour is the biggest party in Western Europe. That's a movement. That's how you change the game and inject real progressive politics into the mainstream (though, I will admit, I'm still dubious as to how far Corbyn will really go).

Oh let me clarify, I'm not happy with the two party race whatsoever, I'm just not sure that the idea of consistently fielding candidates for the presidential race helps much. I'd rather they try and assemble a strong base in singular, more progressive states and move up from there perhaps. In reality though, with the electoral college and FPTP, it'd take a lot more than the Greens to break up the strangehold the two parties have.

In regards to interviews, yes, I have. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to start equating ruminations on nuclear energy or WiFi signals to war-crimes (as in the case of the two major parties) and in a lot of ways I really do agree with what the Green Party stands for. But I just don't think they win a lot of supporters by coming out with stuff that doesn't quite jive with scientific consensuses on things.

They are irrelevant in the modern American political system. They've not shown any interest in getting involved on the local level, they seem pretty anti-science (particularly in regards to their stances on nuclear energy and homeopathy, plus that dumb-as-bricks quote about WiFi waves the other week) and they've never tried to actually build anything resembling a movement.

I like their more recent move towards an anti-capitalistic stance (though that is almost certainly an opportunistic move to try and court the 'Bernie socialists') but that's basically it.

I'm pretty horrified by the situation - it is a clear hate crime, and the body-count is ridiculously high. At the same time though, I not only see this as a terrorist attack (it clearly is, though) by someone self-affiliated with ISIS but I also as part of a rather sad trend of the mentally ill in the United States having access to weapons the likes of which most developed nations have completely restricted access to. The Bataclan attacks in France were seen as an aberration, a once-in-a-generation attack, but the fact that we have similar events to the Orlando shooting happening in our country nearly every year in terms of scale indicates that there's a pretty big problem, at least to me. I dunno man. Social programs and mental health systems have to be put in place for sure, but at least something must be done about our excessive love for arms. Because the idea that they somehow protect our freedoms seems a bit nonsensical when parity with the government's hegemony over violence will never, ever be attained.

As to the radicalization of this shooter, haven't heard much word about it. But his ex-wife from five years ago said that he wasn't too religious but was very mentally unstable and violent. Organizations like ISIS thrive off of the poor, the marginalized, and the mentally ill, and I do honestly believe that if someone were to have so much hate in them to go into a club and kill fifty innocent people that clearly there is something wrong with them. Yes, the ideology is violent and problematic but I cannot think of a way to just 'deal' with the problem - we have to deal with its roots (much like the IRA, the roots are political - our meddling in the Middle East, the marginalization of 2nd generation Muslims in the West, but also our collapsing mental health infrastructure and social safety net and whatnot) and eradicate it over the long-term. That means that these sort of attacks throughout the West are not something we're going to be able to just end, regardless of the security measures - all we can hope to do, I think, is to decrease their frequency but also avoid overreacting. I mean, last I heard, France is still in a state of emergency. That shouldn't be the case. I think, like the Troubles,this is a problem that will stretch out for at least last another 2 decades.

It is a fascinating place! I don't know as much as I'd like on the subject as I've only really just begun digging into it but I can make a couple recommendations as to reading material and the like, if you're interested! It is pretty difficult to get info on what is currently happening in the area but there's a decent amount of material available on the 50s to the 80s (and the pre-CCP era).

As to my dissertation, it is pretty embryonic at the moment but I'm comparing Indian and Chinese minority policies in the 50s and 60s, particularly in Xinjiang and Kashmir. They're both predominantly Muslim, exceptionally important to the idea of the Chinese and Indian nation-states, and basically represented the 'frontier' to both central governments. And I guess I'm just interested in comparing the two modern countries in general, as they're actually a bit more similar than people generally suspect.

Three-Body Problem was a fantastic read, but I'm a bit biased as I'm quite fond of Chinese novels in general.

I am currently reading The New Jim Crow, which is terrifying but brilliant and I'm trudging through an assortment of historical works on Xinjiang and Kashmir for my dissertation, namely Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland and Demystifying Kashmir, which are both excellent.

An unholy amount of essay writing - I have three essays due next Monday (why they are all due on the same day is beyond me) and I am way behind on my Mandarin homework/characters for this week too.

X-Com 2, some Diablo 3 and a bit of Dota :D

Very interesting. Very similar to the situation in China actually - you have a burgeoning labor movement that is more-or-less on the top of the list of the CCP's concerns because it is innately destabilizing to their state while at the same time rather difficult to permanently crush.

I'd vote for either candidate cause I feel like it would clearly be against my best interest not to. I got 65/35 in Sanders' favor.

I read The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson on the plane - that was excellent, well-deserving of its Hugo award I think. I plan on reading Stephen King's Bazaar of Bad Dreams over the next few days - I've heard good things though I doubt it can be as good as Night Shift, which really was a superb collection of short stories.

The Way of Kings is absolutely fantastic yeah and I really, really loved the way he finished Wheel of Time - definitely one of the best fantasy writers out there right now.

I'm doing a masters in Chinese Studies and learning Mandarin (which is...tough...). Anki and memrise have both saved my life many times over by now I think.

Hadn't thought about this element of it so thanks for bringing it up - I guess it's not really something I relate to. But it does make sense, admittedly. It just sorta frightens me.

Other countries have some element of 'gun culture' - shooting/hunting clubs etc. It's not something I'm interested in but I can understand the allure, sure. I think what bothers me about home is the widespread nature of it. A substantial portion of the population owns guns and I guess I just don't quite understand that. Perhaps you are right in that there needs to be a change in attitude around guns, sure, but I really do think that it should at least be some more regulation. But I admit my opinion might be different if I grew up around guns and had respect for them as an outlet/hobby - I guess I don't.

Thanks for the context though, definitely something to think on.

Fascinating and sobering read. Thanks a ton, kb.

This is an unbelievably huge deal. Yeah, most people are right when they say there's little that will come out of it but I think it's pretty hard to ignore just how big this is - the CCP and GMD hated each other so much (mostly because, frankly, Chiang Kai-shek was a total dickhead) that they refused to cooperate and lead China out of its war-torn state together and instead fought a costly civil war and basically stared each other down across the Strait for about forty years. Recently, the GMD's been (rather ironically) more-or-less calling for eventual reunification with China, much to the dissatisfaction of the opposition parties and most of the younger generations in Taiwan. I really am very curious as to how this will all turn out, especially since Ma is quite pro-CCP/Xi Jinping.

I am angry because the deck is stacked, but at the same time...I am optimistic that things will change. Granted that I think it will get much worse before it gets better but I do think that it will eventually become better.

I'm a Sinologist (in-training, anyway...) so yeah you can only guess how excited I am haha. The cynical part of me is sort of wondering whether or not Xi Jinping and co have any ill-intent with this meeting (I'm sure they're aware of how keen Ma is about the whole 'one country, two systems' schtick)...But I dunno. Either way, it's gonna be really fascinating.

The 'dark' ages are a myth (at least in the way we think about em) but I'd actually say modern historians are pretty good about dispelling that. If anything I'd argue that the Romantics were the ones that started throwing the term around really and that recently modern historians are actually much better at seeing past that.

As for modes of thought, I dunno actually. Yeah you had a particular set emerge in Europe during this time but it would be rather silly to think that European thought alone emerged as a victor in the modern day (there are definitive parallels in most civilizations, I'd say, and they tend to appear in very particular time-periods). What I mean by that I suppose is that globally there are different strains of a sort of 'progressivism' (if you want to call it that - ideological breaks from the past) which are not really linked to Europe, and certainly didn't appear in the same context.

To be honest (and this is based on what my professors told me back in my undergrad) you can get away with skimming Said's intro chapter/the first 100 pages. Dude was brilliant but wrote like a Byzantine monk.

In fairness we just read it for his overall message/theme as opposed to his historical analysis (which to be honest is a bit...eh). This was probably just because we didn't need to go through his chronological stuff cause we weren't really studying his work so much as we were studying how to apply it to something very specific

It should have been done about 10, if not 20, years ago. The demographic consequences will take a couple generations to reverse at the least, and simply ending the one-child policy might not directly correlate to people being willing to have more children.

Been listening to a lot of Baroness recently - pretty kick ass soundtrack while I practice my Hanzi haha.

I sometimes comment, but I mostly lurk. I have never made a post, and that has generally been the case for me on most sites (except on certain specific game forums).

I just wished he called himself a social democrat, or a FDR-style democrat, and he wouldn't be quite as vulnerable (and it would be a much more accurate label). But the right really loves throwing around the 's' word.

About once or twice a day - I really love the discourse here and people post some great material reading so it's a nice place to come and catch up on news and etc in the mornings and evenings :) Regarding the spelling, I just call it hubski.

Ultimately this is probably the biggest thing that we need to fix, as a nation - we need to start regulating the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. There are other nations - Switzerland and the Netherlands come to mind - that require enrollment in insurance for all of its citizens (like the ACA) but unlike what we have here, they actually actively keep the prices of medicine and insurance down and mandate that expenses cannot exceed a certain percentage of people's incomes. Even if, as a nation, we absolutely insist on never going the route of single-payer, there are other ways we can achieve universal healthcare that might be a little more palatable to certain segments of the population (though, granted, I still just want full on single-payer myself). Either way, though, the federal government needs to have more oversight and regulatory power.

This damn song has been in my head for like two weeks now. Trust Iron Maiden to create a beautiful, moving (and 18-minute!) song about an airship disaster that happened eighty years ago...

Yeah that story's just been on my mind all fucking day. What a shit-show. My brother (we're Muslim + brown) very nearly got into some serious trouble because someone had sent in an anonymous bomb threat to his school and the authorities immediately assumed that he, as the resident brown dude, was at fault - this was like right after 9/11 I think. Luckily, the culprit confessed before anything took a turn for the worse but still...that story always scared me as a kid. This was in a pretty typically liberal place too, really shocked us all.

Unfortunately, shit like that is happening in a lot of countries these days - I've a couple stories to tell from all around the world, but maybe I've just had bad luck or something. It is really apparent in stories like this in America cause our police force can sometimes be absolutely bonkers but it can take on a very sinister, subtle tone in Europe. It's depressing.