spending a week in space

[amw]

I have been on holiday all week. This week was a twofer of Children's Day and 清明節 Tomb Sweeping Day, so i took a couple days annual leave and made it a full week off. My plan was to do some traveling, although i was discouraged a bit when colleagues told me it'd be even harder to find a hotel over 清明 than it was over the 228 holiday. Well, i would

Comments

[siglinde99]

True regime change and democracy take a really long time. We like to think twenty years is more than enough, but we took several hundred years and still aren’t fully there. It is tempting to focus on the countries that are “closer” but I think that just adds to the inequalities that foster violence and corruption. And I don’t think any of these countries will end up with a democracy that looks exactly like ours, but we also need to accept that there are other ways to ensure communities and individuals have a say in how they govern themselves (and are governed). One of my university profs once said that the best way to help Africa become peaceful and prosperous was to put a giant (metaphorical) fence around the continent and just leave them alone to figure things out. It would be brutal for a while and it would take a lot of guts to let it happen. And of course it’s not realistic because there are too many foreign interests. It wasn’t realistic even in the days before mass migration and the internet, but it was an interesting thought experiment.

But yeah - Hong Kong. I remember watching the handover. We were literally sitting around TVs at work and halfway expecting th PLA would come marching in the moment the ceremonies were over. That didn’t happen and then people got complacent.