Unequal treatment
I find it remarkable that it took the government less than 24 hours to find the body of Taishin Financial Holdings president Lin Keh-hsiao (林克孝).
If it were any average person, it would take weeks — as has been proven with the death of other hikers. This is yet another example of how the rich get special perks.
If you are wondering why London is burning up and revolutions are taking place in the Arab world, look no further than these types of injustices. While the weak suffer, the rich bask in their little world of grandeur.
It is about time that rich people, investors, bankers and their kind wake up and see that ordinary people cannot survive while their companies make a killing.
I feel deeply sorry for the loss to Lin’s family, but I hope that more people will speak out against the unfair treatment we peasants receive.
HARRY ADAMOPOULOS
Taipei
Banning the anthem
No school band, from any country, should ever be asked to refrain from playing their national anthem (“School band told to drop national anthem: official,” Aug. 9, page 3). That the request apparently came from a citizen of their own country betrays the presence of a turncoat in their midst.
To invite a band to play, then dictate what it cannot play, would be like booking Elvis and telling him not to sing Blue Suede Shoes or telling the Beatles to skip Help. There is no reason for it. None.
D. H. RIDGWAY
Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Bad driving in Taipei
I have lived in Taiwan for more than eight years, and the last four in Taipei. I have always been impressed at the safety of living in this city; being able to walk the streets any time of day without fear. It is a reflection of the decency and civility of people in Taipei.
So why is it that when these same people are seated behind a wheel, all sense of decency and concern for others transforms into an arrogance that defies belief, and a sense of entitlement where other people’s safety, even their very lives, are of no importance? Not all drivers in Taipei are like this, but after observing this behavior on a daily basis for some years now, it is clearly an endemic problem.
Suggesting drivers in the city “can’t drive” is to say they don’t know how to drive. For anyone who has completed a driving test in Taiwan, it is of no surprise that the training and testing are hopelessly inadequate.
Go to any major intersection on Zhongxiao E Road at midday and watch drivers taking a left-hand turn. It involves dangerously veering into and across the other lane, establishing a personal inside lane on the opposite side of the road, even if it runs over a pedestrian crosswalk, and finally pushing through a gap of crossing pedestrians. Left-hand turns are mentioned in the written driving test; they are not practiced nor rigorously tested in an actual road test.
Suggesting drivers in the city “won’t drive properly” is to say they know how to drive, but they choose not to. This is a more unfortunate reality of life in Taipei: racing through red lights, not using an indicator before changing lanes, not stopping the car for crossing pedestrians.
The other factor in this madness is what motivated me to write now. While walking home from lunch recently, I encountered a typical scene: a small road with an intersecting street running through it; no traffic lights, but with a pedestrian crosswalk. While crossing the street, a car approached coming down the street from the opposite side of the road and heading through the intersection. When the driver saw I was continuing across the crosswalk, he accelerated toward me; I had to literally dive backwards to avoid him. This is not the first time it has happened, but it was the closest I ever came to being hit full on.
The dangerous ignorance of this particular driver is not what motivated me to write. When I turned to pick myself up, there on the other side of the road was a policeman on a scooter, who had been driving behind the driver of the car coming into the same intersection. He had witnessed the scene. He looked down at me, smiled, and then took a left-hand turn and drove on.
He didn’t use his indicator to signal a left turn.
SHANE JOHNSON
Taipei
Wherever one looks, the United States is ceding ground to China. From foreign aid to foreign trade, and from reorganizations to organizational guidance, the Trump administration has embarked on a stunning effort to hobble itself in grappling with what his own secretary of state calls “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.” The problems start at the Department of State. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has asserted that “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power” and that the world has returned to multipolarity, with “multi-great powers in different parts of the
President William Lai (賴清德) recently attended an event in Taipei marking the end of World War II in Europe, emphasizing in his speech: “Using force to invade another country is an unjust act and will ultimately fail.” In just a few words, he captured the core values of the postwar international order and reminded us again: History is not just for reflection, but serves as a warning for the present. From a broad historical perspective, his statement carries weight. For centuries, international relations operated under the law of the jungle — where the strong dominated and the weak were constrained. That
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment on Friday last week to add four national holidays and make Workers’ Day a national holiday for all sectors — a move referred to as “four plus one.” The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who used their combined legislative majority to push the bill through its third reading, claim the holidays were chosen based on their inherent significance and social relevance. However, in passing the amendment, they have stuck to the traditional mindset of taking a holiday just for the sake of it, failing to make good use of
RSS