Re: Syndicate: Taiwan-China Cyberwar

[t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

michael.benson@pristop.si (Sat 10/23/99 at 05:35 PM +0000):

> Greetings. It seems the real cyberwar has already started, and we 
> didn't even know about it. See this text by Ian Buruma in the New 
> York Review of Books:
> 
> http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?19991104009F

hm, yeah, i read that all right. someone finally woke NYRB up
from their ginger-corduroy slumbers and they sicked their man
who writes about byzant^W komplikated stuff on the technology
beat. the result?

     I found the following argument on Taiwanese inde-
     pendence expressed in broken English on a website
     called Free Talk: "Fuck UR mother. I fucked 17 
     mainland whores." Whereupon another debater on the
     same issue responded: "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck
     UR Taiwanese mother. Taiwan is China province."

!  \/\/0|\||>3r  \/\/}-{4+ |\/|r. |3UrU|\/|4  \/\/!|_|_  54`/

\/\/}-{3|\|  }-{3 |\/| B1FF^H i mean ant!orp!!! 

> It also contains some interesting points about China, as an "imagined 
> political community", being one nation partly due to the shared media 
> resources -- Taiwan, PRC, Hong Kong -- on the net. Apart from being 
> at war.
> 
> Still, i.m.h.o.Buruma seems to miss that one reason English is 
> sometimes used in the argument between those online in the PRC and 
> those in Taiwan is that people speaking Mandarin rarely speak 
> Cantonese, and vica-versa. 

buruma misses an awful lot, imo. what do you think he'd make 
of the fact that lists like syndicate are predominantly anglo-
phone? reminds my of my old byzantine history prof who pointed
out that, based on monetary evidence, future historians would
be perfectly justified in concluding that most people in the 
US spoke english and latin. 

> Cheers,

cheers,

> MB

t
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