Twitter conundrum

I've had two Twitter accounts in the past that I used for a while and then deleted; I've had one account that I never finished setting up because I  wouldn't give them my phone number. I skim some people's Twitter feeds to keep up on some of the goings-on about Taiwan-related research and other things of interest, but I'm afraid to set up yet another account because I know how I get when I join a social network, and I just don't need that right now. But on the other hand, the number of Twitter feeds that I am interested in following keeps growing, and I don't know what else to do. I suppose I could bookmark all the feeds I'm interested in, but that doesn't seem very efficient.

I might look into figuring out how to set up RSS feeds for Twitter. Maybe I can add them to my Feedly app and see them that way.

(A little while later) Hmmm... Looks like you need to get Feedly Pro+ to be able to integrate Twitter. Have to decide if I want to pay $8.25 a month for that.

OK, I've decided that I don't.

There's also something called "FetchRSS" that will allow Twitter. But the free version deletes unused feeds after 7 days of  inactivity and updates feeds only once every 24 hours.

This article suggests a few options, but it seems most of them don't work anymore.

I suppose I can try the free version of FetchRSS if I can keep myself down to 5 feeds and 5 articles in a feed. Except that the whole reason for doing this was that I am interested in more and more feeds...

Oh how I miss Google Reader!!

[Update: I'm trying to use Blogger's "Blogs I'm following" function to see if that will work. It seems I can at least catalog the Twitter feeds I'm interested--sort of like bookmarking them. Which means I'm back to where I started....]

Broken links

I wonder what bloggers do (or are supposed to do) when the links from old posts get broken. I mentioned a couple of posts from seven years ago and 14 years ago to a colleague and in the process noticed that most of the links didn't work anymore. A search on one of the sites that had hosted the linked-to pages didn't turn up the material I had linked to; I'm guessing that the material was considered time-sensitive or not worthy of archiving. Speaking of archiving, I guess I could try to use the Wayback Machine to find some of those pages; that would be worthwhile in some cases if not in all of them.

Trouble is, I tried a Wayback Machine search on one of the "worthwhile" pages and nothing turned up. "This page is not available on the web because page does not exist," they tell me. But it must have existed at some point--I linked to it, after all. Anyway, I think there's no realistic solution to this problem, though I'd be happy to hear of some if anyone has any ideas.

Ragesurfing

This is the term I came up with this morning to describe how I lurch from one anger-inducing news story to another about the intersection of politics and COVID-19 (and, sometimes, bad reporting).* I imagine I'm not the only person who does this. I've seen the term "doomsurfing," but that describes something a bit different--as Kevin Roose defines it, doomsurfing consists of "falling into deep, morbid rabbit holes filled with coronavirus content, agitating [one]self to the point of physical discomfort, erasing any hope of a good night’s sleep." Ragesurfing, perhaps a subspecies of doomsurfing, is characterized by the active pursuit of news articles that you know will make you angry and a descent into the rabbit hole of reading the comments on stories or social media posts with an emphasis on the ones that you strongly disagree with or that are dismissive or insulting to your perspective. "I knew there would be some idiots who would agree (or disagree, as the case may be) with this posting!" you say, vindicated in your belief that not everyone on the internet is as enlightened as you (OK, this is about me), at the same time growing more and more angry and despairing at how stupid and/or evil "they" are.

I'm not sure what motivates ragesurfing; Roose, in another article, argues that what he calls "machine drift" happens when our thoughts and emotions are influenced by our online experiences through "a combination of humans and sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence." He quotes the adage that "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." His objective is to explore how our tools shape us, which, if you believe that ragesurfing is a result of being manipulated by our tools, seems an important consideration. Maybe his podcasts will shed some light on this phenomenon (though he'll probably end up giving it another name that will stick better than "ragesurfing," which will probably make me even madder).

Note that ragesurfing doesn't imply engaging those other points of view, though I guess it doesn't preclude engagement. Personally, I don't have a Twitter or Facebook account, so my consumption of social media is strictly from the sidelines. This might enhance the feelings of impotent rage--Roose suggests that "using social media actively makes us feel better than consuming it passively," but I have no intention of diving into the volcano just because I'm burning my feet by dancing around the edge.

I suppose that ragesurfing, unlike doomsurfing as it's currently being used, does not have to be concerned only with coronavirus-related content. However, it makes sense that it would surface now, when I'm stuck at home, sitting in front of the computer or staring at my phone way too much.

I need to get back to grading right now, so I'm just going to post this as a "half-formed thought." I'll try to stay away from my usual grazing locations. Like a cow that eats too much lush green grass in the spring, I'm liable to start staggering around and fall over. (That simile probably proves I'm a suburbanite.)

*Update: I found the hashtag "#RageSurfing used once in a late 2018 tweet:

Doesn't seem to be exactly what I mean by the term, though... "Ragesurf" also comes up, as in this tweet:

Still doesn't seem to mean the same thing.

I'm supposed to be grading...

"A Government of Merchants": GHK (indirectly) on the Trump administration's handling of COVID-19

[Update, 10:48 p.m. Well, this doesn't make any sense, probably  because I've been feeling tired and dizzy all day. The "parallels" are kind of loose. I guess the part I would emphasize here is that both regimes were/are corrupt and that both "leaders" didn't/don't take responsibility for their incompetence and corruption. I didn't go into Chen Yi's role in the cholera and bubonic plague outbreaks, but there's probably some parallel there, too. See this paragraph from Denny Roy's Taiwan: A Political History, where Chen's first director of public health declines to stop dumping sewage from cholera wards into ponds that were used for fishing by saying, "After all, only the poor people are contracting the disease." The only parallel is that reading about what's going on now gives me the same feeling of impotent rage that reading Formosa Betrayed gives me.]

Reading about some of what has been going on with the way the Trump administration is handling the coronavirus reminded me of chapter five of George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed. This chapter, entitled "A Government of Merchants," contains descriptions of the Chen Yi government in Taiwan that are sadly evocative of the Trump government's practices. To name a few:

• Kerr: "Next the Governor's own men developed a firm control of all industrial raw materials, agricultural stockpiles and confiscated real properties turned over to them by the vanquished Japanese. By the end of 1946 these huge reserves were fairly well exhausted, and at last in early 1947 the Governor's Commissioners imposed a system of extreme monopolies affecting every phase of the island's economic life. This was Chen Yi's 'Necessary State Socialism' in its developed form and the ultimate cause of the 1947 rebellion." 
• From Raw Story today (4/3/20), we get the news that after Jared Kushner claimed on Thursday that "The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use," the Strategic National Stockpile's website changed the Stockpile's mission statement to reflect Kushner's view. The original mission statement that called the Stockpile "the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out" and promised to get "the right medicines and supplies ... to those who need them most during an emergency." The new mission statement removes those assurances and calls the Stockpile "a short-term stopgap buffer" that can be used "to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies." The onus goes to the states to develop their own stockpiles, which is almost impossible to do since, as some governors have complained, the federal government keeps outbidding state and local governments on personal protective equipment (PPE). (It's admittedly not an exact parallel, but the similarity is that the federal government--through Kushner--is claiming "ownership" of the stockpile. Who is Kushner referring to when he says "it's supposed to be our stockpile" (emphasis added)?) Although Trump would never use the term "necessarily state socialism," it's the same kind of graft...
• Kerr: "To loud demands for action [on rice shortages caused by government confiscation] the Government first replied with flowery talk of 'patriotism' and 'food for the Army, defending Formosa from Communism,' and then Chen lost patience with the critics. He sharply denied Government responsibility, countering with charges that the Formosans themselves were selfishly hoarding grain. Undoubtedly some Formosans were, but the quantities in private hands were insignificant."
• While the Trump administration outbids state and local governments on PPE and denies its responsibility to supply them with needed supplies, Trump accuses hospital employees of stealing supplies. As Kerr says about the hoarding of grain, there might be some theft, but as the Vox article says, it's "hardly on the scale the president has suggested, and only what is needed to keep hospitals running given the federal government had not been able to provide them with badly needed supplies."
• Kerr: "After the Transfer [of Taiwan from Japan to the KMT government] few of these stockpiled materials reached the open market through legal channels. In most instances we have records of quantities surrendered (records made by the Japanese), but only the vaguest indication of what became of them. Of 423,000 tons of camphor surrendered, for example, an official report shows that only 400 tons were actually refined in the first half-year of the Chinese occupation. We do know that very large shipments left the island, assigned to private warehouses in Hong Kong. Nearly 3,500,000 cases of matches were surrendered, but an acute shortage of matches developed in Formosa in early 1946. (At the first People's Political Council, in May, the Government spokesman explained this, saying that the Government had been able to distribute only 1473 cases in the first six months 'because of lack of adequate transport.') The match stockpiles, too, had gone to the mainland."
• An April 2 question-and-answer between CBS' Weijia Jiang and Rear Adm. John Polowczyk of the Joint Chiefs of Staff confirms that the "airbridge" the US government has established to bring in supplies from abroad is mainly being used to supply private companies with those much-needed medical materials. In other words, the taxpayers are paying to provide shipping services to commercial companies that then sell those supplies to the highest bidder (among state and local governments)--which means that the taxpayers are paying (at least) twice for the supply of these PPE, ventilators, and other medical supplies. I don't know if this is illegal, though I know it should be...

I could go on, but I have to think about my blood pressure...

Sent this to NPR about COVID-19 management in Taiwan

I've been getting frustrated with how the US media has been generally ignoring Taiwan's management of the coronavirus, especially in contrast to the mismanagement here at the federal level. The WHO is busy praising the PRC for its handling of the coronavirus, but the fact is that Taiwan was much more open, transparent, and effective in its response from the beginning.

An interview on Weekend Edition yesterday with Bruce Aylward, senior advisor to the director general of the World Health Organization, was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. In response to that interview, and to the fact that as far as I've heard and seen, there hasn't been any coverage of Taiwan's response, I wrote the following short note (I edited the links for this blog, since I couldn't make active links on the contact form):

In response to the interview yesterday with Dr. Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization and his portrayal of China's response to COVID-19, I wonder why there has been no coverage on NPR (as far as I can tell from searching the website) of Taiwan's successful response to the coronavirus. If you look at articles like this one from Al-Jazeera and from the JAMA Network, you can see that Taiwan is actually leading the world in managing the coronavirus crisis. This, in the context of the WHO's continued refusal to allow Taiwan even observer status. (See also this article from Foreign Policy.) Taiwan is even helping other countries like Palau with coronavirus management. American listeners would probably be very interested in hearing about a country where the government is proactively and effectively curbing the spread of COVID-19.

I also sent this to PRI's The World and CNN. I don't know this will have any effect on the lack of coverage of Taiwan, but I encourage anyone else who wants to spread the word to write to their favorite stations, local and national. I'm not on social media, so I don't know how much this is already going on, but we have to keep pushing Taiwan's story in various ways.

[Update, 3/14/20: NPR's website now features an article entitled, "With Odds Against It, Taiwan Keeps Coronavirus Corralled." I don't know if my email had any role in this, but it's good news.]

WHO is for Taiwan?

OK, that was a terrible title. It just struck me, though, that the other day I posted something about a petition to support Taiwan's participation in the World Health Organization, and then I noticed that someone had found their way to a post of mine from almost 15 years ago that bemoans the fact that Taiwan was not allowed in WHO. There's a sad consistency to all this. (And if you look at Michael Turton's entries about Taiwan and WHO, you can get even more of a sense of this.)

*Sigh*

By the way, if my loyal reader(s) haven't signed that petition yet, don't let the fact that there are already over 100,000 signatures stop you from signing. The more signatures, the better!

George Kerr: Teacher, sailor, poor man, ... spy?*

The claim that George H. Kerr was spying for the U.S. during his first period in Taiwan (1937-1940) has resurfaced, this time in a 2017 publication by respected historian Chen Tsui-lien (陳翠蓮), 《重構二二八：戰後美中體制、中國統治模式與臺灣》 (Reconstructing 228: The Postwar US-China System, China's Ruling Model, and Taiwan**).

Chen cites three sources that claim Kerr collected intelligence for the US during his time as a teacher in Japanese-controlled Taiwan. The first, Huang Jinan (or N̂g Kí-lâm [黃紀男]), wrote that Kerr was sent to Taiwan by the Central Intelligence Agency as a spy (臥低的間諜). Chen neglects to point out the problem with  N̂g's story: there was no CIA before 1947--even its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) wasn't established until 1942 (the OSS's precursor, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, was established in 1941).

The second source, Wu Hongren's (吳宏仁) 一個家族。三個時代:吳拜和子女們 (which I am still reading after all these months!), says that after WWII, when someone asked Kerr about why US bombers avoided bombing Taipei First High School (台北高校), he admitted that he had been on a mission to collect intelligence about Taiwan during his time teaching there in 1937-40. However, the "someone" (有人) of whom Wu speaks isn't clear (in fact, it could very well be N̂g--Wu doesn't specify that it was a former student).

The third source that Chen uses is an indirect quote from Wang Chengxiang's (王呈祥)'s awful book, 《美國駐台北副領事葛超智與｢二二八事件｣》 (U.S. Vice-Consul in Taiwan George H. Kerr and the "228 Incident"). Wang at least points out that Kerr couldn't have been working for the CIA at that time, though somehow misses out on the fact that the OSS also didn't exist yet during Kerr's first time in Taiwan. Wang quotes a University of Hawaii professor, 鄭良偉 (Robert L. Cheng) who wrote (in a comment board post that is no longer available) that Kerr, who was living in an apartment overlooking Pearl Harbor, told Cheng that he often thought about how, with a heart full of righteousness and patriotism that let him overlook any danger, he went to the enemy territory of Taiwan, on the one hand to teach English, and on the other, to engage in secret field work to collect intelligence (滿腹的公義心及愛國心，讓他無視任何危險，前往敵國國境的台灣，一方面教英語，一方面進行秘密的田野工作，收集情報。) One problem with this statement is that in 1937, Taiwan (or even Japan) wasn't "enemy territory" yet, and unless Kerr was being anachronistic or had a bad memory by the time he talked to Cheng, he wouldn't have been motivated by Pearl Harbor in 1937.

The quote from Cheng in Wang goes on to say during the war, Kerr joined the US Defense Department and was sent to Taiwan. At the time he was publicly known as an English teacher, teaching at Taihoku Provincial College (which is now Taiwan Normal University) and many leaders in the Taiwan democratic movement (like Peng Mingmin) were students of his. (Wang notes in a footnote that Peng actually wasn't one of Kerr's students.) Kerr's "secret identity" was that of a  member of US Naval Intelligence. (在世界大戰期間，Kerr以他的專長學識，投入美國國防部。他被派到台灣。當時他在台灣的公開身份是英語教師，任教於高等學校（現在的師範大學前身），許多台灣的民主領袖（如彭明敏）都曾受教於他。他秘密的身份是美國海軍的情報員。) This account is so totally confused that it's hard to imagine it appearing in a serious history book. It appears to be suggesting either that Kerr was in Naval Intelligence before the US entered the war or that he was teaching English in Taiwan during the time that the US was fighting against Japan. Either way, it's not only factually inaccurate--it's patently ridiculous. I seriously doubt that this came from a conversation with Kerr, unless Kerr was having problems with his memory (or Robert Cheng was having trouble remembering the conversation).

Note that I'm not saying that Kerr didn't make use of his knowledge acquired in Taiwan once he did join Naval Intelligence. I'm also not saying that it's impossible that Kerr might have passed some information on to the US government while he was teaching in Taiwan (though I'm guessing that they would have done better to use a "spy" who could actually speak and read Japanese and/or Taiwanese). But there's no real evidence, as far as I know, that Kerr was "sent" by the US government to Taiwan in 1937 to collect information, and the evidence that has been given in Chen's book is not much more than confused hearsay. The rest of her book seems to be well-documented, and I hope it's more believable than this part.

I have another problem with Chen's interpretation of Kerr's motivations for pushing trusteeship and later independence for Taiwan, but I don't have time to get into that. Suffice it to say that in my view, Kerr's motivations were probably more complicated and changing than what Chen thinks. (She seems to believe that he was totally motivated by his loyalty to the US and its interests.)

*I'm using "sailor" loosely here to refer to the fact that Kerr worked in Naval Intelligence during WW2.

**I know, awful translation of the title.

Hmmm... seems to me I was gonna say something here...

Been doing a lot of waiting recently. Yesterday the former native Chinese speaker and I went to a certain unnamed teahouse (that claims it's the inventor of bubble/pearl milk tea) and waited an hour for my lunch to show up. (The fnCs got hers relatively quickly.) But the guy who delivered my meal apologized all over the place and gave us some coupons for free tea the text time we have a spare afternoon to wait for it.

Then this morning we went to the New! Improved! Mini-story of Foreign Affairs office in Fengyuan to get the address on my Alien Residence Card changed. (You gotta do that within 15 days of moving, or they'll fine you NT$5000.) Used to be you could go to the Foreign Affairs Police in the Fengyuan Police Station, wait a few minutes, get yelled at by the officer because you didn't bring the right documents, and be on your way pretty quickly.

Now you go to the New! Improved! MoFA office across the street--look for the banner that says, "Taiwan for UN--Peace Forever!" (or is it "UN for Taiwan--Peace Forever"?). We waited in the office for close to two hours, got nagged by the officer because we didn't bring the right documents (Can anyone tell me why they insist you bring a 戶籍謄本 instead of a 戶口名簿? Don't you need the latter to get the former?), and were out in a minute and a half.

But at least the fnCs and I had some nice conversations while we waited, so I can't really complain...

Son of Frankenscheduling

We just got our schedules for the spring semester. Because this semester everyone so enjoyed the long weekend of Oct. 6-10 and the Saturday make-up on Oct. 14, it has been decided that we'll have not one, not two, not three, but FOUR make-up classes on the Saturdays of March 3, March 10, April 14, and June 9 (to make up for days off on Feb. 26, Feb. 27, April 6, and June 18, respectively). Joy joy joy.

The reasons for this are, first, to give people a longer winter break--beginning classes on March 1 rather than Feb. 26 (too bad I already bought my plane tickets). And April 6 is the day after Tomb-Sweeping Festival, so they had to give that Friday off. (But why make it up? What happened to Spring Break?) And then June 18 is the day before Dragon Boat Festival (a Tuesday), which is a day off.

So is this going to be a trend? Every semester we'll be getting these bizarre schedules? I've been around long enough to remember teaching on Saturdays, but at least it was a regular thing back then. Maybe we should just get rid of the 5-day week here and go back to the good old days...

Anybody else's schedule for spring looking like this, or are we the only ones?

De/construction

Now that the summer is over and I'm not at home as much, the destruction/construction work in the downstairs apartment that went on for over two noisy and smelly months is also wrapping up. This is the good news. Now that I'm at the office more, though, they've begun ripping out the (concrete) walls in the Chinese Language Center downstairs from me and drilling through what's left. It's like I'm leaving a path of construction in my wake...

On being "borrowed"

I was going to write some comments about an article I just read on a topic near and dear to me, but as I was reading through the article I found that some of the language and ideas were a little ... too familiar. I saw that the writer cited in the bibliography an essay I had posted on the web several years ago. I made a little comparison between the two and found the following:

• Near the beginning, there are some phrases that are almost exactly the same as my phrasings. The phrases are all part of one sentence in the introduction. (I'm not Shakespeare or anything, but the phrasing is almost word-for-word.)
  
• The writer also used sources that I had used, which is perhaps not surprising, although we are not in quite the same disciplines. The writer used a couple of quotations I had also used.
  
• In one case, I had put a long quotation from a secondary source in block quotation format. The writer of this article used the same passage, changed a couple of words, and included the passage in the body of the article without marking it by quotation marks or block quotation format (although there was a parenthetical citation of the source).
• In another case, the writer used the same two short quotations from primary sources that I had also used in my paper. These were not "obvious" quotes (partly because they are from primary sources). Also, the writer didn't cite the source of those quotations in the bibliography. And the writer's translation of one of the quotations is almost identical to mine. (Again, there is no indication given whether or not my paper was the source of these quotations.)
  
• There were also several references to a key concept/term that I had used, but no definition of that concept (something I had provided) or citation of the source of that concept.

The article itself is rather wide-ranging and is longer and goes into more detail than my short paper did. It makes use of secondary sources that I didn't use--mainly because the writer is not in the same discipline as I. So I'm not saying that the writer just copied my ideas--there's quite a bit in the article that wasn't in my paper.

I think it's possible that the writer of the article didn't mean to borrow ideas/language without properly citing them. (Which is also why I'm not saying what the article was or who the writer was, though some readers can probably guess what the topic was.) And I am glad that my paper was at least mentioned in the bibliography and in an in-text citation. And I guess I'm not too surprised that the editors and reviewers of a highly-ranked journal like the one that published this article wouldn't be able to catch these problems before publication. But it makes me sad, and it makes me less willing to put more scholarly stuff on the web. I don't have a lot of great ideas (maybe none!), and if my future as an academic depends on getting my ideas published in some scholarly forum, maybe I'd better keep my mouth shut about those ideas before they're published.

I'm sure I'm not the only person this has happened to. What did you do when it happened to you?

Going crazy...

For the past two weeks, workers in the apartment downstairs have been knocking out walls, drilling into concrete, and doing whatever else they can do to make as much noise as possible. It's not only driving me absolutely insane, but it's also got me worried that some day we're going to wake up in the morning and find ourselves in the basement. Grrrrr...

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the chemicals they're spraying down there. Paint? Paint remover? I don't know... For some reason, though, it reminds me of "The Cloud Minders" from Star Trek...

[Update, Sep. 5: They're still doing work--hammering, sawing, drilling, shouting, smoking, all as loudly as they can. I hear they'll only be doing it for 10 more days, though...]