A Blog Post for the Sake of Making a Blog Post

For the past week or so, I've been thinking that I need to post something on my blog. Not so much because there was something specific I wanted to talk about (though there are always things to talk about), but simply because I have only made one post this month, and I'd like to be a bit more consistent (usually I manage three posts a month, occasionally only two or as many as four). But up until last week I was busy working on my paper on Taiwanese aboriginal songwriter BaLiwakes, which I presented at a conference that was held in Taidong last week celebrating the hundredth anniversary of his birth (I suppose I could just post the paper itself, but it's in Chinese and anyway I still plan to eventually start a blog devoted specifically to music, which would be a more appropriate place for it). Since returning from Taidong I have been occupied with several translation jobs. Actually it's not true that I didn't have anything to post about; I'd like to do at least a cursory survey of the many books I've read since my last post on my recent reading, but that would take too long. So here it is, the end of the month, and all I can do is this little place filling post.

I suppose I could comment on the recent elections in Taiwan (they took place this past weekend), but as my only other post this month was on election results (in the US in that case), I don't really want to talk about them at length. Still, in the absence of any other quick topic coming to mind, a brief overview of them can serve. The election was for the mayors of the major urban centers of Taiwan (Taipei, Xinbei City [as Taipei County is soon to be rather pointlessly renamed], Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung), city councilors in those locations, and neighborhood heads (in Taiwan the smallest administrative division is the li, which is essentially a neighborhood). The results were mixed, with the DPP winning only two of the big races as opposed to three for the ruling KMT, including losses by their two heavyweight candidates in Taipei and Xinbei, which despite generally leaning toward the KMT (particularly true of Taipei) were considered to potential DPP gains. On the other hand, their candidate in Taichung came closer than expected, and they won easily in Tainan and Kaohsiung (the latter was particularly a relief, as the KMT candidate had the gall to criticize the incumbent mayor for inviting the Dalai Lama and allowing a film about Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer to be shown at a city government-sponsored film festival). They also elected the same number of city councilors as the KMT (130) and actually received a substantially higher share of the popular vote.

Results were mixed in other ways. A number of the worst candidates in the city council races lost, but a fair number got in (in our area a candidate with known gang ties running as an independent took the third of three seats after a massive advertising campaign that exceeded those of all other candidates in the area). None of the Green party candidates for city council came close to winning, but on the plus side they got more votes than in the past, and our local Green party candidate managed 7.5% of the vote, not too bad considering unlike the above-mentioned gangster-type (or to a slightly lesser extent the KMT and DPP candidates) he didn't have billboards, campaign flags, banners or ads on buses all over the place. He actually got almost half as many votes as the KMT candidate squeezed out by the gang-connected independent candidate (the other winners being another KMT candidate and a DPP candidate) and far outdistanced the other independent candidate (who didn't advertise much either, though he had a few flags up). So while there's still probably a long way to go before Taiwan starts electing candidates with little money but real principles like those of the Green party and a few independent candidates (not the gang-connected ones, obviously), maybe it'll happen someday.

A final interesting point about these elections is that some, particularly in the DPP, believe that the shooting the day before the election of the son of former KMT leader Lien Chan may have influenced the results in the KMT's favor (Lien Shengwen was shot in the face while campaigning for a KMT candidate; he was not injured as seriously as might be expected but a bystander was killed). Whether this is true or not is hard to say for certain, but since the KMT has often claimed the pre-election shooting of then-President Chen Shuibian in 2004 influenced that election in his favor, it's not unreasonable for the DPP to make the same claim.

Looks like the above summary of the Taiwanese election will have to serve as the main theme of my second post for this month. Hopefully I can make up for my slacking next month, and also get in one or two posts that aren't related to elections (three in a row is a bit much).

2010 Election Recap

I've been intending to do a recap of the US election for the past couple of weeks, but I was too busy doing a paper on a completely different topic (the songs of a Taiwanese aboriginal songwriter named Baliwakes). It shouldn't surprise anyone that my general feeling about the election is one of disgust, similar to seeing Israel elect a Likud government or seeing La Pen come in second in a French presidential election. Not that the Democrats are all that great; a lot of them are blatantly self-interested and have taken foolish positions (such as opposing a public option or a carbon tax). But the Republican candidates were in almost every case clearly worse, at least in terms of their stated positions on key issues like the environment, budgetary policy, health care, and so forth, and in many places around the US people still elected them. The elections were widely seen as a referendum on Obama's policies (though exit polls shows votes didn't necessarily prefer the Republicans' policies by any significant margin) or his perceived failure to improve the economy. But his policies, while far from perfect, have not been that bad, though he sometimes compromised on their implementation so much that the results were mixed, and as for the economy, only the ignorant could have expected any president to turn it around completely in a space of two years, considering the state it was in when he was elected. But then the ignorant are unfortunately fairly numerous, in the US as elsewhere.

Still, this result was expected, and it could have been worse. Not only did the Republicans fail to win control of the Senate, but some of their most extreme candidates lost. O'Donnell was expected to lose (that even a sizable minority voted for her is bad enough) but Buck in Colorado, Angle in Nevada and Fiorina in California all were close or even ahead in pre-election polls. As bad as the overall results were, it's consoling to note that the candidates I specifically named in my previous post as ones who shouldn't be elected as senators were not actually elected. But even in the Senate, there were some bad results -- how Wisconsin voters could pick Ron Johnson over Russ Feingold is beyond me. And one or two of the winning Democrats aren't all that great either -- Joe Manchin of West Virginia took a gun to the carbon cap and trade bill in an ad, sucking up to both the NRA and the coal industry in one stroke (though the Republican would no doubt have been still worse).

In Texas, the results were even more overwhelmingly bad than they were nationwide. Not one of the candidates I voted for came even close to winning. I ended up voting for Bill White for governor, which I regret, not only because he lost by a substantial margin, but also because I still think in principle it's better to vote for the candidate you agree with most (in this case Deb Shafto) even if they have no chance of winning. At least the Green candidate for comptroller got over 5% of the vote, guaranteeing the Green Party a place on the ballot next time (I know this will not make all Democrats happy, as they think -- rightly in most cases -- that Greens will take votes from Democrats, but I think people should have as many choices as possible). For that matter, as I noted in my pre-election post, it would have been a great day if even one of the candidates I voted for won. In other words, that they all lost is what I expected.

California, as has happened in the past, showed a bizarre mix of relatively sensible votes and considerably less sensible ones. They rejected the Republican CEO candidates for senator and governor, as well as an attempt by oil interests to block implementation of a law addressing climate change, but they also foolishly rejected the legalization of marijuana (a drug that is overall less harmful than either alcohol or tobacco). They got rid of the ridiculous, gridlock-inducing requirement that budgets be passed by a two-thirds majority in the legislature, but added a new one requiring the same supermajority for adding new fees, which added to the same absurdly high bar that was already in place for increasing taxes proves that Californians, like other Americans, also like to vote for calorie-free chocolate cake (see the link to Kinsley's piece below).

Nationally, what remains to be seen is how Obama will deal with the constraints placed on him by the Republican control of the House and their bigger minority in the Senate. Considering the Republicans' record over the past two years, I'm not too optimistic about the chance of anything much good getting done. Their rhetoric since the election hasn't given me any more hope. For example, we've already had self-appointed tea bag Republican Senate leader Jim DeMint claim that the deficit can be cut without touching Social Security or defense, as "hundreds of billions of dollars" can be saved by cutting "waste" elsewhere. One has to wonder if he is knowingly spouting nonsense, has a very odd definition of waste, or is actually unaware of the real numbers in the budgets he's been voting on over the last six years (the total for all non-defense discretionary spending is only $530 billion dollars, so to save hundreds of billions out of that you'd have to cut nearly everything). But at the least I hope Obama can find ways to get it across to the public that the Republicans are the ones standing in the way of finding real solutions to problems, solutions that benefit the majority, not a privileged few.

Here are some interesting links from the past few weeks that relating closely or distantly to the American political situation:

U.S. is not greatest country ever by Michael Kinsley

I Still Love Obama. Love. Love. Love. by Curtis Sittenfeld

Mugged by the Moralizers by Paul Krugman

We Are All Juan Williams: Associating minorities with crime is irrational, unjust, and completely normal. by Shankar Vedantam