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Post 80

Saturday, March 10, 2007 - 1:42pmSanction this postReply
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I'm curious as to whether, if the Ayn Rand Institute would go along, of course, an internet published set of Ayn Rand's works - in English or Chinese - would actually make it through the censorship.  I notice that correspondence from the mainland on the internet always has these Hu-Man Ri-ghts obfuscations to attempt to defeat the censors.  Perhaps groups such as Fa lun G ong have evolved more sophisticated means of breaking the information barriers?

Or would it matter?  Today on KPFK's Digital Village program, one of the longest running and most listened to internet related radio programs on the planet:

China just announced a ban on any new internet cafes for the next year.

Sweden, meanwhile, had legislation introduced that would allow unlimited secret state surviellance of all electronic communication without any warrants, etc.  When the Prime Minister or whoever is top dog in their institutionalized thuggery was called on it, with objections re basic human rights, he responded that the law was actually introduced in order to create safeguards to protect from posible abuses.  In fact, he is reported to have said, Sweden had been tapping phones and monitoring electronic communications of all other kinds for the past six decades without mentioning it.  So, nothing to get upset about...  (And what was YOUR name, BTW?)

And, here in the U.S., frontpage headlines regarding the release of information about the FBI (surprise, surprise) using the authority of the "Patriot Act" for surveilance of Americans having nothing to do with terrorism or national security.

Of course, any attempt to get information through censorship has to deal with the problem of snitches.  To see just how bad it can get, readers might want to see the German movie that won an oscar, "The Lives of Others."  (It deserved the Oscar.)  In East Germany apparently about 40% of the population was reporting, regularly or as needed, to the Stassi on their neighbors thought crimes - real or fabricated.  (Reportedly, J. Edgar Hoover's dream was an FBI modeled after the Stassi, BTW.)

Plus, a new arms race is now apparently takeing place among all of China's neighbors as it pours money into its military.  Japan appears to be retreating into denial of its war crimes while also increasing its military readiness.  While the Japanese probably do not have any nuclear weapons, they do have reactors, and plenty of time to build up a supply of the plutonium that naturally results.  They also have what is reported to be by far the most advanced fighter plane in the world.


Post 81

Friday, March 16, 2007 - 12:45pmSanction this postReply
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Hello!

I am very interested in thick black theory. Is there a copy of this text - even in chinese on the internet? Is the text available or is it still hard to find due to being verboten?

I do not expect it to be like Sun Tsu art of war - but I am s t i l l  v e r y interested in it.

Thickblack 


Post 82

Friday, March 16, 2007 - 8:18pmSanction this postReply
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Thomas Smartho Samoth
I have a copy of la version chinoise de thick black ology. If you give me your em-ail, I will send it to you.



Post 83

Friday, March 16, 2007 - 9:24pmSanction this postReply
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WARNING ERROR! Read post 83! Originally I said:

=====

The book is in print and rather cheap.

Thick Face, Black Heart: The Warrior Philosophy for Conquering the Challenges of Business and Life by Chu Chin-Ning


(Edited by Ted Keer
on 3/17, 5:49pm)


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Post 84

Saturday, March 17, 2007 - 11:40amSanction this postReply
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Sorry, "Thick Face, Black Heart" is NOT the same as "Thick, Black Theory."  The former was published fairly recently - early '90's, I think, while the latter was published in the early years of the 20th Century.  The former is written by a woman who is a business consultant by trade.  Her book is loosely based on the underlying threads of "Thick, Black Theory," but is a completely independent work otherwise.

According to my memory of the long interview in "Success" magazine, with the cover story "The Art of Deception," she was then making a good living by alternating between going to China to give high-priced business seminars to Chinese CEOs on the subject of how to fleece the naive, trusting, ignorant, Western barbarian businessmen, and then returning to the States to give high-priced business seminars to U.S. CEOs about how to avoid being fleeced by the sly, corrupt, dishonest Chinese businessmen.

The "Success" interview also went into some detail as to how some of the then current scams were going down.  Typically, a Western company would enter into a joint effort with some Chinese company, which would last right up to the point that the Chinese company had acquired all the intellectual property and whatever else it could scam from the Western company.  Then they would go bankrupt, dissolve, disappear, etc.   Next, a new company or companies would appear in China, run by the very same people, employing the stolen intellectual property and/or physical machinery that had disappeared with the original company.  But the Western company would only find out - if then - when knock-off products started appearing, undercutting their prices.

Often the Chinese company would send liasons to the U.S. to "work with" the U.S. company in a coordinated production effort.  Various U.S. companies who tried this would then discover that a whole lot of phone traffic was happening in the middle of the night. Further investigation might reveal that the entire set of records for the company had been faxed back to China.  It used to be said that the Chinese would buy ONE of anything.

One of the other points made was that it is virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to truly learn spoken Chinese.  You can learn all the words and their separate meanings, and you can communicate using this knowledge on a purely literal basis.  However, a native speaker, especially a well-educated Chinese native speaker will also have an implicit knowledge of allusions drawn from experience, history and literature which again - as I mentioned earlier in this thread - make it possible for the Chinese in a business negotiation to communicate on a level that the non-Chinese participants will not even realize is there.  This was and is not restricted to the "Mandarin" system of Confucian bureaucracy. 

In English, for example, if I were a State Dept. negotiator referring to some incident involving use of lethal force by police in China to suppress a demonstration by villagers whose land was being stolen, but one in which the villagers were also members of Falung Gong, I might say "That's another Waco."  In context, most politically knowledgeable Americans would understand that this referred to the violent destruction of the Branch Davidian religious sect by the FBI, in which about 80 people died.  That would go right over the heads of most non-Americans, although I can virtually guarantee that the Chinese negotiators would record and check out the allusion afterwards. 

One interesting aspect to Chinese communication is the lack of frills.  Literally everything means something. When I have done ads for the Chinese company where I'm employed, I can't put in any stylistic elements just for style or appearance - or even readability.  If I try, I will invariably be called on the carpet to explain what the element is supposed to mean.  The attitude is generally that I must be trying to secretly undermine the company by planting negative messages in the advertising.

One of the factors that encourages the "Art of Deception," in Chinese business culture, is that the power structures of Chinese culture are largely preemptive rather than reactive, which is more common in the West.  It is assumed, for example, that any non-family employee will betray the company interests for personal benefit at the first worthwhile opportunity.  That the draconian measures taken to pre-empt this would themselves be likely to encourage that very attitude by employees is, in fact, taken into account, but the assumption is thoroughly ingrained that this will happen regardless, so they have no real choice.

The Chinese computer guru who set up their original network where I work and wrote all their accounting and customer database sofware, for example, told me just before he quit in 1992 that the company had ripped him off by some $30,000 which was supposed to have been his completion bonus.  In revenge, he cleverly put everything - literaly - in one network directory, knowing that the company president, who considered himself quite computer savvy, would never figure it out, as his prior experience was entirely with CP/M, which has no subdirectories.

Shortly thereafter, I was approached by other employees with a problem.  They would create a file in WordStar, save it, and then discover later that it had disappeared!  I was not on the network, and it took me all of 2 nanoseconds to think to ask, "how many files are in that directory?"  I assumed without having ever used WordStar that it had a finite file display buffer.  I then told them to write down the filename and type it in instead of using the directory display to select from.  They were awestruck at my genius when it worked...

So, I wrote up a memo, with graphics, explaining the problem and suggesting solutions as to how to break the one directory up into logical subdirectories.  I also spent 30 minutes creating a mini-database file in DBase, which I had never used before, to illustrate how employees could enter keywords, revision numbers, etc., to make files infinitely more findable.  Then I took my memo to the company president.

Two days later he informed me that "No one could understand."  Then he spent a good portion of the next two years devising a naming convention for files, as in "FW000016.pm4," which would be "Form" "Warehouse" number 16.  I and several other employees wasted a few hundred man-hours revising this system until the president was satisfied.  Then it was taped to every monitor and everyone was required to use it.  After a few weeks or months, everyone else ignored it and returned to naming files so that they could find them.  However, the president kept checking for the next year or two to make sure that I was using his system, even if noone else did.

No good deed, etc.    ;)

Of course, the naming convention did nothing to solve the problem, which continued for several years, as that one C directory was jammed with tens of thousands of files.  Additionally, the guy who had devised the revenge had left the text source files for the databases, etc., on the net, but  no one knew what their names were.  Thus, they had no way to change the compiled DBase or Clipper applications.  At one point I discovered how to acquire a bunch of German trade magazines, and the Sales Manager instructed someone to find all the dealers and enter their contact info in the potential customer database.  However, the German telephone numbers would not fit.  So, he told the employee, "Just enter as much of the telephone number as will fit the space..."

(Edited by Phil Osborn on 3/17, 12:38pm)

(Edited by Phil Osborn on 3/17, 2:13pm)


Post 85

Saturday, March 17, 2007 - 5:48pmSanction this postReply
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Phil, thanks for the heads up and for preventing me from ordering the wrong work.

Ted

Post 86

Saturday, March 17, 2007 - 7:16pmSanction this postReply
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"One of the other points made was that it is virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to truly learn spoken Chinese. You can learn all the words and their separate meanings, and you can communicate using this knowledge on a purely literal basis. However, a native speaker, especially a well-educated Chinese native speaker will also have an implicit knowledge of allusions drawn from experience, history and literature which again - as I mentioned earlier in this thread - make it possible for the Chinese in a business negotiation to communicate on a level that the non-Chinese participants will not even realize is there. This was and is not restricted to the "Mandarin" system of Confucian bureaucracy." - P. Osborn

Phil, again, you impute to China in this paragraph what is common to all cultures and all languages everywhere. The background knowledge of a culture is never explicit in the literal meanings of its words. That's why poetry exists. If I told an Andaman Islander "Now it's broken and needs to be fixed," do you think he would get it? American GI's regularly asked soldiers unknown to them to quote baseball statistics and so forth during WWII to prove they weren't Germans in U.S. uniforms and the Navajo code-talkers didn't just use Navajo, they used slang and code and Navajo all to make sure what they said was uninterpretable. My employer does not allow its employees to use internal company lingo to outsiders, and for good reason.

Now of course fraud is wrong, but being obscure to outsiders is no less difficult in Ebonics, Cockney rhyming slang, or any other argot than in Mandarin. And in case you are old enough to remember the 1970's detergent commercials, there is no "Ancient Chinese Secret."

I just spent three days and some 12 hours negotiating and securing a private business transaction in Spanish. I can read and watch movies in Spanish. I dream in Spanish. But I can neither tell jokes reliably nor get jokes in Spanish at all. If Spanish is that inscrutable to a polyglot native English speaker, why is Mandarin worthy of being singled out as particularly "Confucing"?

Ted Keer

Post 87

Sunday, March 18, 2007 - 4:08pmSanction this postReply
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Porque? 

No, butter...

My one Espanol joke (you had to be there).  Oh, and when I used to take the internationale bus to TJ to buy my prescription drugs, on the way back we would invariably have to stop at the INS checkpoint station on the I5 N in the middle of the desert. I made up a song for the occasion - don't recall all of it, but it used the "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" melody - as in, "La Migra, la migra. Donde es la puta, la migra?  ....

Oh, and my Hispanic friend that I see at the gym all the time - "Juan."  ...  "You're the Juan!" (my greeting to him)

I had my first ever dream in German recently after seeing "The Lives of Others."  Surprised the heck out of me, as I had never dreamed in German in the '60's when I took four semesters of it.  I never learned it that well, either, so I don't know if my dream was at all accurate. That is a very powerful movie, though, which  I thoroughly recommend.

My introduction to the idea that the Chinese language might somehow be especially prone to use for deception came with the "Success" magazine interview, where it was made quite explicit.  Also, in the interview, the method by which "Thick, Black Theory" was researched, and the basis for its conclusions and analysis were consistent with such a position by themselves. The author simply interviewed scores of powerful people in Beijing, both in government and in business, and compiled a common set of characteristics that virtually all people in power seemed to share.

My 16 years experience working for a Chinese company has done nothing to disabuse me of that, but since I don't speak Chinese beyond what is useful for my job - "Duay" (meaning "Yes, You are correct, I agree."), I can only go by what I've said above.

However, it also dovetails with the contrast that Fukuyama makes between Japanese culture, which is notoriously high trust, and Chinese culture, which is just the opposite.  As I mentioned much earlier in this thread, the Japanese language itself tended to encourage vertical trust, while the use by the Chinese bureaucracy of its own hierarchical language, reflecting a common set of references which were required to be essentially memorized to move to the next level of authority, encouraged the opposite.

Further evidence, to recap, emerges when we look at the paradigm mistake that Chinese in positions of power seem to almost always gravitate to, namely that only information which supports the position already taken by those in power is allowed to be passed up the chain of command. Virtually every time you see some incredible disaster in China, you can trace it to this same error.  This is in turn a reflection of a fundamental lack of the concept of objectivity - much less a philosophy based on that concept - as versus the issue of "face."


Post 88

Sunday, March 18, 2007 - 6:00pmSanction this postReply
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Well, I could tell quite a few good Polish jokes too, but they'd be in English...

Your "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" melody - as in, "La Migra, la migra. Donde es la puta, la migra? That was funny, if just a bit ungrammatical. "Es" should be "está," and you can say "Donde'stá" and still keep the meter.

My Grandmother, on the other hand, used to tell of a funny incident at her church kitchen. She was not Roman but Byzantine Catholic, meaning she followed the Pope but said the Mass in Old Slavonic, what is called the Ruthenian recension. The Ruthenes are a people of the Carpathian mountains (like Dracula, but he was a Romanian, not a Slav) who have not truly had their own state since the Middle Ages when the city of Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv was the capital of the Kingdom of Ruthenia. The name Lemke/Lemko means from Lemberg, and it is Ruthenian, as is (Admiral) Nimitz, (Andy) Warhol(a) and a lot of other names.

Back to my Grandmother, there are two main dialects. The northern dialect of her tongue always accent the second syllable (following Polish) while the southern dialect has free stress, meaning the stress can fall on any syllable as in Russian or English. While in English this rarely matters (CONduct is a noun with initial stress, conDUCT a verb with final stress) in East Slavic tongues stress can change the case or tense or meaning quite radically.

The word for pepper in her dialect is poper ("paw-pair") and past tense verbs in the feminine (derived from an old past particle with gender) end in "-(e)la." Verbs can be marked with the prefix "po-" to indicate completed action in a way very similar to the German "ge-" as in bought = ge-kauft. Well, the verb root for "to put" is "de-" (related to English "do") and the root for "fart" is "perd-" (which, after Grimm's law p>f, d>t is cognate to the English "fart"). So when the who spoke the dialect from south asked "gde poPER dela?" meaning "where did she put the pepper?" the rest of the ladies who spoke the other dialect heard "gde po-PERdela?" meaning, of course, "where did she fart?" the shift from PO-per to po-PER made an unintentional pun, and my Grandmother loved to recount this as her "Polish joke."

=====

As for the musings of that lecturer on Mandarin, she is engaging in what academics call folk-linguistics. It is common for people who speak various tongues either to stress how logical (Frenchmen) or how obscure and difficult and inscrutable to non-natives (other Frenchmen,) there tongue is. This is no more than the usual mixture of pride and superiority people like to feel about their native tongue. Such attitudes are no different from the claims of people that they don't have a dialect (which I hear from New Yorkers all the time) but that only other people do. Given that you admit this lecturer was tailoring her speeches to her audience, you can also take her claims about the especial inscrutability of Mandarin in the same light. Swiss Germans, Sicilians and many others will regale you about the uniqueness of their dialect - and they are all correct, since every dialect is unique.

=====

As for dreaming in foreign tongues, I still do so in Spanish since I speak some almost every day. But I have also occasionally dreamt that I have been speaking Russian or German. I know the latter to be an illusion of the dream because my German vocabulary is mostly forgotten from lack of practice and my Russian is quiet broken and incomplete. If I actually dream in Spanish it will normally be in relation to actual events and people. When I dream that I am speaking some other tongue it is in relation to fantasies such as meeting the Pope or the Czar or so forth.

=====

For anyone who wants an engaging introduction to linguistics with rigor but minimal technicality should read Anthony Bugess' A Mouthful of Air which treats the major European tongues, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and others and introduces the concepts of comparative linguistics painlessly while dispelling a lot of myths held by laymen.

From Publishers Weekly:

Burgess, who invented a teenspeak for the gangs in his novel A Clockwork Orange, infects readers with his love of words in a delightful, wittily urbane romp through the world's languages, in particular "volatile and hospitable" English. This is several books in one: a painless primer on linguistics; a survey of tongues from Albanian to Welsh (spoken by King Arthur, a Romanized Celt); the story of alphabets and of language's evolution from prehistoric Indo-European to words like quark ; an exploration of how English became rich and flexible as Old English was transformed into what is spoken and written today. Chapters cover slang and taboo words, great dictionary makers, poetry, the Bible, film dubbing, how Shakespeare spoke his lines. Burgess also offers tips for learning foreign languages and suggestions for secondary-school English teachers. A Mouthful incorporates much of Language Made Plain , published some 30 years ago, but it contains a wealth of new material.

Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

=====

Ted Keer

Post 89

Monday, March 19, 2007 - 11:51amSanction this postReply
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Ted: As a lexophile you are undoubtedly familiar with this classic:

"Mots d'Heures Gousses Rhames", i.e Mother Goose Rhymes.

http://www.amazon.com/dHeures-Gousses-Rhames-dAntin-Rooten/dp/0140057307


Post 90

Monday, March 19, 2007 - 12:26pmSanction this postReply
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Actually, no Sam, but I have put it in my basket for consideration.  I bought my nephew (current avatar) D'Aulaire's Greek and Norse myths for his christening (paganing?) and remember them being some of my favorite books as a child.  I got them out of the school library every other week, since they had to be shelved for the other kids to read.

I pretty much only read European languages now in technical books, such as my German-language grammar of the Altaic languages by Nikolas Poppe or my French title on the myths of the Caucasus Mountains.  I did read some Hugo for pleasure and the tale of the city mouse and the country mouse in French though.  Mostly now I study exotic languages, watch Spanish films, and speak French with cab drivers d'Afrique.

I am also considering buying my sister a Mexican nanny, but was warned not to watch the film Babel...

Ted Keer


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