I was hoping that’s what LK was going for and I am not disappoint.
Well, to top off the running joke I suppose I could bring “chinaman” into the fray.
No offense to any resident Asian-Americans.
Pfft. I’m more of a racist than you guys are towards the Chinese.
Big Lebowski aside, I think it’s interesting how the preferred nomenclature changes depending on where you live and which civilizations your grandfathers have subjugated in the name of imperialism. In the British Isles, for example, you wouldn’t refer to someone from Japan or China as Asian, because Asian in the context of British sensibilities denotes someone of Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, or similar descent.
In the British Isles, for example, you wouldn’t refer to someone from Japan or China as Asian
Well I would (I’m British). I don’t know if that’s because of Britain’s involvement in China, or because of the influence of American media, but I’d definitely refer to Chinese as Asian. It would seem strange, on the other hand, to call an Israeli, Turk, Saudi or even Iranian an Asian.
The derogatory term in Britain for anyone from South Asia, be they Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, is just “paki”. Obviously Indians find that particularly offensive.
‘Asian’ has certainly become a catch-all for India/Pakistan/etc rather than the Japanese and co. You’ve been away for too long, Tim ;)
Actually for me Asian denotes mostly people from the far east region of Asia, ie Vietnam, Korea Japan China , etc…Pakistan, Iraq falls under Middle-East and India is India :)
I definitely think Manning is worthy of Amnesty International taking a hard look at his case.
I’m not saying it isn’t :). Just look at the BBC Asian network - I wouldn’t expect to hear Japanese pop music there.
But if someone said to me that they had an Asian friend, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were Chinese. I would be surprised to discover an “Asian friend” was Israeli or Saudi though. I also wouldn’t expect to eat curry if someone suggested we go out and “eat Asian”, I would expect to go to a Chinese, or maybe even Japanese, restaurant.
Actually, Tim’s right. In many parts of the world, Asian and ‘Oriental’ are quite synonymous.
That would make sense if we were discussing “many parts of the world”, except we’re not. We’re talking about Britain.
Oh those backward people.
U.S. officials say latest planned WikiLeaks release will do most damage yet
The newspaper said it would release all the documents at 4:30 p.m. EST Sunday. WikiLeaks and the newspapers are expected to release the documents and their findings at the same time. However, the release time has changed several times over the past few days.
Shit is getting real.
Seems like the bulk will be informal diplomatic exchanges, but let’s hope for some shocking revelations!
I’m not sure what people are expecting, but I’m expecting to be shrugging. That doesn’t mean there won’t be damage control needed, but unless you have naive ideas about how diplomacy works, I can’t imagine it will be all that shocking.
And if it causes political unrest all over the place then was it really necesary to dump this stuff out? It’ll be interesting to see.
I have read [b]this[/b] in various places…
Included are 251,287 cables and 8,000 diplomatic directives
One cable dates back to 1966, but most are newer than 2004
9,005 documents date from the first two months of 2010
Der Spiegel, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and El País have had access to the files and reviewed them.
AP:
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has told whistleblower WikiLeaks that its expected imminent release of classified State Department cables will put “countless” lives at risk, threaten global counterterrorism operations and jeopardize U.S. relations with its allies.
In a highly unusual step reflecting the administration’s grave concerns about the ramifications of the move, the State Department late Saturday released a letter from its top lawyer to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his attorney telling them that publication of the documents would be illegal and demanding that they stop it.
It also said the U.S. government would not cooperate with WikiLeaks in trying to scrub the cables of information that might put sources and methods of intelligence gathering and diplomatic reporting at risk.
This is the part that has always made me mad. The US Gov has always made a big stink about Wikileaks’s releases putting lives at risk, but they’ve always refused to help censor those parts and names, leaving it up to Wikileaks.
It shows that the US Gov’s primary concern isn’t protecting people, but discrediting Wikileaks.
I don’t know. It’s a bit of a rock and a hard place. How can you disagree with what someone is doing, and then help them to reduce collateral damage? It would be like giving the enemy better targeting information so they can better hit the military targets and avoid civilians.
We do that all the time, actually, by telling our enemies things like “Hey, this is a hospital”.
But how would that work, really: The U.S. government would take these gazillion documents and spend the next few months reading them and censoring them and then tell the Wikileaks guy, OK, you can release these now? And the Wikileaks folks would actually then be willing to release them with everything the government has blacked out?
Heck, if I was Obama I’d tell my people "OK, let’s see if he is really sincere in letting us censor them: tell him to give them to us and then we can read everything that is about to be released, take the time to censor it, then give them back something that reads like “The ________ was _______ in London, but __________________ and _______________ disagreed and we thus recommend __________________.”
No. Wikileaks would black out names to protect military personnel (like they’ve always done), then give the documents to the US gov to double check for accuracy.
Ultimately though, it really doesn’t matter. The US isn’t gonna agree, and Wikileaks has shown that they can do the job well. Not a single reported person has been physically harmed because of the Wikileaks releases.
I’m a little surprised that all the US has done about these supposedly so damaging leaks is wring their hands and make pathetic appeals. If Wikileaks was targeting a country like Russia Julian Assange would have been poisoned or shot long ago, and if that hadn’t stopped them their families and loved ones would start having unfortunate accidents. The Americans seem unwilling to take similar action, which might seem noble but in my eyes looks pretty weak when its their people on the line.