Tibet and the Media

The recent Tibet uprisings have been quite horrible. But it is the ensuing debate across the international media and posting of individual commentators that has been most revealing. Sloppy reporting by the Western press and Chinese government propaganda have ensured that it is unlikely that the question over Tibet's sovereignty will ever be resolved satisfactorily.

On one hand. Western media has been very sloppy in its reporting of the uprisings.



This has led to the Chinese feeling that they are being persecuted by the Western media in a deliberate campaign against Chinese. This is not an uncommon feeling to Chinese friends of mine, who have discussed issues as wide -reaching as separatist movements and CD piracy with me in terms of the United States "attacking us." The reason that they feel that this is a deliberate campaign is most likely due to a familiarity with campaigns from government-controlled Chinese media and perhaps perceptions of the Western media as being a professional and perhaps infallible source of information.

The official line that China is part of Tibet is perhaps best summed up by this video.



The producers of this video present some facts of Tibetan/Chinese history whilst conveniently forgetting other parts. For instance, Tibet was an independent state from the late 600s through to the early 1200s. As there are with the Turkic nomads to the North and West of Han China, there are noted instances of marriages between the imperial/royal dynasties of China and Tibet. This indicates that even if Tibet was not treated as an equal by the Chinese of the time, it was at least accorded the respect of being an independent state and, perhaps, a threat. Furthermore, it was not until the Yuan dynasty that Tibet was brought into the Chinese Empire. The Yuan, of course, were Mongols. So I would ask the purveyors of the second video shown above whether they would perhaps like to return Tibet, or even greater China over to the control of Ulan Bator.
Of course, such an argument is a facetious one, akin to having Texas and California granted independence or returned to Mexico, or perhaps even returning Normandy to Norway or Acquitaine to the British throne. It is not my purpose to provide a solution to this problem, but rather to show the foolishness of relying on such historical arguments in a situation such as such.

In any debate, there are opinions that differ from that which might otherwise be expected. To illustrate, I leave you with this interesting article from China Digital Times. Read it, it does appear to be a voice of reason amongst a cacophony of posturing.

Future Music Festival is Crap

People have been saying that the Australian festival scene is dead. But I think that it is merely moving on. Festivals are being changed by the music that is showcased and the people that attend. Of course, I can only speak as far as Melbourne is concerned so perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Melbourne festival scene is changing.

Take for instance the Big Day Out. BDO has had a bit of a hard time in Melbourne lately, being shifted around from venue to venue in the wake of the refurbishment of the show grounds. Last year's, at Princess Park, was a success. The bands were great, the crowd good, and the venue comfortable. This year, at the Flemington Racecourse, the bands were still great but the sound suffered at times. The crowd was worse than last year, with more people so far gone that one wonders why they bothered to show up at all. And the venue was a disgrace. Dusty, filthy, and with very little natural shelter. I suppose that's what happens when you stage a music festival in what is essentially a gravel car park. But overall, it was still a Big Day Out and lots of fun.

Future Music festival was shit. The big draw card for me were The Chemical Brothers, but it was their set that epitomised all that was wrong with it as a whole. Their set lacked energy, lacked passion, and lacked the spark that the Chems have become famous for. And it is little wonder, considering the crowd that gathered on the hill of the Sidney Myer Music Bowl to watch. Who were they? For the most part they were pissed bogans, dressed in their finest fluoro, munching pills and getting pissed on vodka and lemonade. Rather than being a feature of the day, the high point and climax, The Chemical Brothers were reduced to being background muzak to the inane conversations of rednecks more interested in getting fuck-eyed and belting out a horrid rendition of 'Jesse's Girl' than being sucked in to a mind-bending set. Is it any wonder that The Chemical Brothers didn't even finish their allotted time and scarped as soon as they were given the chance to get off stage.

I suppose that festivals are somewhat like nightspots. A bar with gains a reputation for a good atmosphere, good music, etc. and people begin to go there more often. Then, as word spreads, more people come, including those who ruin the atmosphere for others. This has happened with the company Future Music. Future Music in Australia have encouraged the fluoro singlet and shirtless muzza brigade so as to extract the most amount of cash without a thought to the music. They have become the worst type of greedy corporation, one without morals or guidance to allow the continued survival of their industry.

So I'm on the lookout for new festivals and places to go without Melbourne's most unsavoury elements. Or perhaps I should find a new hobby, such as picking my toenails and flicking the jam at people.

Xinjiang: A signwriter's paradise/hell

From China Digital Times.

It's good to see that the dogmatic China we all know and love is not yet dead.

Links

I just thought that I might add a few links to the blogs of Chinese cyberlebrities I have been studying recently:

Muzi Mei


Furong Jiejie



Xiao Pang

Back Dorm Boys

There are a lot of strange people on the Internet

One thing that strikes me about wandering through cyberspace is the never ending column of weirdos that I encounter.

One that springs to mind at the moment is Muzi Mei, Chinese sex blogger. I'll not repeat her story here, because it has repeated far too often before。 Needless to say, her choice of communication was groundbreaking in China and she is almost singlehandedly reponsilbe for th explosion in popularity of blogging in that country. Or at least that is what hyperbolic commentators insist upon. It is not my purpose to debate here whether or not that is the case, but one oddball has gone on to spawn many other oddballs.

One of which is this person. It appears that s/he has some sort of a rescuers syndrome going on, and is intent upon saving Muzi Mei through artistic critique. Furthermore, the URL seems to be at odds with the goal of the page as described by the text. 'funstuff_69" and religious moralising don't normally go hand-in-hand.

Muzi Mei has also caused copycat sex bloggers such as Furong Jiejie to appear. Furong Jiejie is a rather boring and plain narcissist, who gets hits by being controversial. She does this by making ridiculous claims vis a vis censorship or her own beauty.

I suppose that is the beauty of cyberspace, each gets to be their own.

Summer... gone...

It's been a while since I've checked in here. I've been working and haven't found the time to sit down and scribble away to whoever it may that actually reads this. Not much has happened over the past few weeks except that I've had to knuckle down and finish a few reports. It has been tough and my favourite month of the year, January, has just disappeared. I have always loved January because it's all about the beach, Summer festivals, and fun in the sun; but this year I've barely moved from the computer. I feel robbed.

I did go to the Big Day Out on Monday. It was fantastic. Rage, Bjork, and Pnau were all fantastic fun which distracted from the dust and the heat of the afternoon in the Flemington Racecourse car park. Anyway, I'll be back again soon. I've too much to do today.

New perspectives

I watched an old documentary last night called The Beyond Within. It tells the story of LSD from its synthesis, to its use as a psychotherapeutic drug in British mental hospitals in the 1950s, experiments on an unwitting American population by the CIA during that same period, to its use as a recreational drug during the 1950s, and the eventual moral panic that ensued following its release on and unsupervised use by members of the general public.



What was most interesting about the film was not so much the story of the drug itself, but the philosophical and theological arguments that surround its use. There are a number of sides to the discussion. The first, represented by Ken Kesey author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, holds that the drug unlocked creative potential in humanity that would have otherwise lain dormant. Linked with this point of view is that of Timothy Leary, who saw it as a way to reclaim spiritualism in the increasingly materialistic and power-hungry society that he saw the United States as having become. Included in this general group is Aldous Huxley, who, after an experiment with mescalin, became an I believer in the expansive power of psychedelic drugs.


The documentary shows a number of experiments conducted to investigate the meaning of the experience of the drug. One, a filmed experiment that before the release of the film had not been shown to the public, showed a British MP who was required to answer a series of questions before being administered the drug. At regular intervals he was asked more questions as well as to describe elements of his surroundings. Each time he was able to complete the tasks, but said that he was unable to describe the colours of his surroundings for lack of vocabulary. Also, he was not concious of things having succession, but very concious of time. When interviewed for the film 30 years later, he explained his experience. Rather than spending a few hours sitting in his drawing room occasionally removed to a place of euphoria, he spent an infinite amount of time in another time and place. He hadn't spent a few minutes or hours in that place, but months or years, occasionally interrupted to answer a few questions in his drawing room. Interestingly, he argues that control of the drug is necessary because of the social and health problems that it is capable of causing.

This is a view shared by the discoverer of the drug, Albert Hoffman. In The Beyond Within, he points to the fact that similar substances used by other cultures, such as peyote, are always used by under the supervision of a shaman. For the modern world, he believes that the shaman is the psychotherapist, pointing to a decade of successful use during the 1950s as a therapeutic drug. However, he concedes that the youth movement of the 1960s hijacked the substance leading to its unfair demonisation at the end of that era. A similar point of view was put forth by a representative of the NHS, who tells the audience that although there are dangers to the drug, such as psychotic episodes, these usually occur as a result of the street manufactured status of the drug and that the difference between the users of the 60s and the 80s was that the former were using it to discover things about themselves and that the latter were using it as escapism. Thus part of the problem is in intention. Of course drugs can be abused. However this does not mean that they are incapable of providing the transcendental experience. Sex has been viewed in the same way. For some societies it has been a part of mysticism, and it too can be abused. One need only think of sex addiction or of the increasingly perverted material that can be sourced from the Web.

For many of those users, the experience that they described as having was termed as being 'religious' in character. This is a point of view that has been labelled invalid by philosophy professors both then and now. A study by Walter Pahnke, entitled Drugs and Mysticism showed that the experience of taking LSD was no different from that of a religious visitation. This conclusion was reached by taking a number of students studying to enter religious orders and administered either psilocybin or a placebo to them, before asking them to complete a survey of their experience after the affect of the drug had worn off. This survey was then sent to religious scholars who determined the veracity of the experience. However, the contrary argument posits that the LSD experience is bereft of the obligations and dedications of the recipient of a genuine visitation. In that case, the recipient has contributed to society and to a cause, earning the experience as part of their efforts. Consequently the visitation is contextualised as a visit from a heavenly presence. The LSD user has no such contextualisation, so even if they were in the presence of God, they would not know it.

The use of religious language is to describe an experience that is otherwise indescribable. It is symptomatic of the lack of vocabulary that we have already seen with the aforementioned filmed experiment. It is described as such because it is an experiment that is similar to that which we learn to believe as being religious. This is congruent with peyote use in Mexican Indian religious ceremony. The peyote is used to send the recipient on a spiritual journey to allow him/her a new perspective on the world.

In this way LSD can be seen as a tool for reconstructing reality. The difference between a good and bad trip is that of unsanity and insanity, of the sublime and madness. In each case we catch a glimpse of the Real. Freud, Jung, Lacan, et al. have showed us that reality is constructed and LSD allows us to tear down that construction and reassemble it in an alternate form. Hence its use as a therapeutic agent. It works by removing the natural filters that are in place between our senses and our conciousness. The overwhelming messages are uncensored reality, sight, smell, sound, taste, touch- everything is Real.

For Leary, the drug offered a chance to reshape the world, "the kids that take LSD, they're not going to become your grey-haired, whiskey-drinking generals to wage war; they're not going to become your grey-haired, whiskey-drinking CEOs who add to the materialism of society." However, as is rightly pointed out, the same problem arises here as it does with the religious experience. The very society that Leary rejected was the one that allowed him to flourish. He was tearing up Rousseau's social contract without a thought as to how society would continue to function in its aftermath. Who would run the hospitals, power plants, and produce the necessary tools to survive on a scale required by the modern world.

Aldous Huxley requested an injection of LSD on his deathbed. Before he died he wrote "Try LSD." Surely LSD is capable of providing a transcendental experience, but the same has been said of ecstasy and marijuana. Sometimes we all need a different perspective on life, the universe, and everything, but we cannot forget our obligations to others for a world. We cannot all be holy fools travelling the world with our begging bowls, because then there would be nobody to beg from.