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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (5863)	2/14/2001 10:45:58 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 82486

I'll tell another animal story to illustrate a point (you can't stop me!). When I was about 23 I was fond of motorcycle camping over various parts of the Southwest. One night in Death Valley, my meager rations were being attacked by a kangaroo rat. After being awakened by the little bugger 3 times, I decided to catch it since I was now wide awake. I donned my MC gloves (didn't want to get bitten by a rabid kangaroo rat) and waited under the hood of my mummy bag. Sure enough, the little rat came back and was caught. The thing went into a self-induced coma. I picked it up and it was apparently lifeless. I put it on the ground and poked at it with my gloved finger (I was starting to worry that I'd accidentally squished it). It finally ran off and didn't come back to harvest any more caramel peanuts. The point of this story is that the "smart" thing to do would have been to struggle, try to bite me, and run off right away as soon as had I caught it. But sometimes creatures (and people) don't do the smart thing and just faint. Perhaps under some circumstances that's adaptive. Politically, the people of China have fainted. They are just too full of fear to do the "smart" thing. Instead, they lie there limp. So, no, these "morals" are unlikely to represent "the Chinese". Let me add, lest we feel too sorry for them, that the Chinese are extremely xenophobic and racist. I was in Hong Kong and a drug store was selling "Darkie" brand toothpaste with a caricature of a grotesque black man smiling a big toothy grin and holding a toothbrush. It was a major brand! There were no blacks in Hong Kong, so who's going to complain. What is moral there is highly subjective. It is okay to be insensitive to racial stereotypes of blacks (an oppressed group) yet people let oppression be imposed upon themselves. It is a weird world out there.