Weekend Jukebox and Open Thread

5 thoughts on “Weekend Jukebox and Open Thread”

1. The recent assuredly non-hockeyriots in China.

   One-offs or a start of a trend?Report

   1. From what I understand, the stuff that happened in Libya and Egypt (and everywhere over there) happened soooo fast because everybody hated the state but nobody knew that everybody else hated the state too because information was so tightly controlled and folks were afraid to talk about it with casual acquaintances.

      Once the intertubes (twitter, etc) allowed for great anonymity, everybody found out that everybody hated the government… and the next thing you know, you’ve got thousands in the central square.

      To answer your question: It depends on how well China handles the information.Report

2. China will just mow down the protesters and disappear the history. Can you say Tiananmen Square?Report

   1. Not correctly, I can’t get yet a handle on tonal vowels. And even Englishfied, I almost always leave out the second ‘n’ (TEE-yen-ah-men)Report

   2. But seriously, in a way, the Tiananmen Square protestors can be seen as the equivalent of ‘dirty frickin hippies’ or spoiled brat college students (or both) which the PLA had little problem dispatching (and other Chinese middle-upper class people had little problem writing off.)

      These ‘Jeanstown’ riots on the other are a fairly large mass of ‘ordinary’ people – at the very least, definitely working class people – and the type that, in the end, sided with Mao 70 years ago to overthrow the ruling cliques.

      That said, the PLA still has a lot of tanks. Probably more and better ones than they did in 1989.Report

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