Dream of the Dragon

Tag: history?

April 13, 2010

Burying hatchets.

by Justin

There’s a a lot criticism lobbed at journalism today for its brevity, its focus on headlines – really, the general lack of understanding and context in most mass media. It isn’t shocking, and it’s frankly hard to avoid given the nature of phenomena like Twitter reinventing the way people consume information. Ideally there’ll be some backlash against the current deluge of information and there will be popular demand for depth – for the sorts of lessons that only emerge from an appreciation of history.

Roger Cohen over at the NY Times killed it yesterday offering just that. Read the rest of this entry »

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April 8, 2010

Man your own jackhammer.

by Justin

Ladies and gentlemen: China is out of effing control.

At first I suspected that it always has been, but that might not be accurate. The original ruling dynasties seemed to keep things in a kind of order – maybe because the country is so large and populous that a unified whirlwind could never be summoned. The Mongol agenda was one of service and submission. My grade-school understanding of that period is that China was poor and ineffective, united more by the greed of a conquering power than anything else. A Chinese ascension prior to Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward must have been impossible. Even during Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution Read the rest of this entry »

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