This week has seen a wide assortment of remarks from a wide variety of people — well, mostly politicians — that beggar belief. With such a cornucopia to choose from, it was hard to pick favorites. The underlying factor unifying the disparate utterances highlighted below is an apparently callous indifference to the rights of individuals, be it political choices or privacy.
First, National People’s Congress Standing Committee deputy secretary-general Li Fei (李飛), who braved demonstrators in Hong Kong on Monday to say that offering voters too much of a choice in the 2017 elections for the territory’s next chief executive would only leave voters “confused.”
Having to choose between several candidates would be troubling because “people may not know what they advocate and what they have achieved,” he said, adding that limiting the numbers of possible candidates would “guarantee genuine choice for voters.”
Not that a Beijing apparatchik — or anyone in the Chinese Communist Party — would know about voter choice, but remember what happened ahead of the last chief executive election in March 2012, when Beijing had to make a choice. The Chinese government thought it had the perfect candidate in former Hong Kong chief secretary for administration Henry Tang (唐英年), until the discovery of an illegally built basement “leisure space” under his house outraged the territory’s cramped residents. Tang blamed it on his wife, but to no avail, and Beijing was forced to go for a backup, government adviser Leung Chun-ying (梁振英), who then won the election to no one’s surprise.
It seems Beijing did not know as much about what Tang “had achieved” as it thought. Perhaps it just wants to spare Hong Kong voters the pain it went through in finding its preferred candidate was a loser.
Second in the stupidity sweepstakes was formergeneral-turned-premier Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村), who on Wednesday proclaimed that Taiwan’s fate was not up to its people. It had not been “in the past, is not possible now and will not be possible in the future… the Republic of China’s future ought to be decided by all Chinese people,” he said.
It is true that the people living in Taiwan in 1895 did not get to vote on being given to Japan by the Qing Dynasty, neither were the people of China asked to vote on the issue. “It has always been like this” is not much of an excuse for trampling on the rights of a nation.
Third are the faceless people behind the members-only Facebook page known as pai she (拍社) that bill their creation as a “special candid community.” Turns out the community is neither special, nor candid, unless you take a pervert’s delight at poring over photographs of unsuspecting females whose breasts, thighs, buttocks or other portions of their anatomy were deemed worthy of photographing by strangers in shopping malls and other public places.
The Facebook page creators said they are only sharing photographs of beautiful female bodies for their members to enjoy, while their defenders accused critics of ruining “many young men’s pleasure.”
It is not special because, unfortunately, the Internet is filled with Web sites that specialize in these kinds of photographs, and far more explicit depictions. There is nothing candid about men — specifically men, because membership in pai she was restricted to males — who secretly take photographs up females’ skirts or down their blouses or dress tops.
A common excuse is that females are asking for attention by wearing short skirts or shorts and skimpy tops, especially in hot summer months, so why not photograph them? Why is the same not said about men who walk around with their T-shirts hiked to their armpits in a bid to stay cool? They are rarely the focus of a Facebook page or a magazine spread.
Taking secret photographs is an invasion of privacy. Depriving people of their right to choose their elected leader is an abuse of human rights. Stupid is stupid.
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