That’s funny about the Chinese business thing. In India, they detest the Chinese and their products. I assume, based on various discussions in my own family, that part of it is fueled by straight competition, and part of is political - Tibet because it is on their own border, and Taiwan just because. But otherwise, the Hindu culture usually demands tolerance (pretty handy, that 10,000 avatars thing!). And so, I would be that while they may have a very opinionated subculture in Malaysia, that tolerance doctrine is probably a very good influence. (Providing you are not a dark-skinned woman, of course…) OTOH, they are still coming out of the whole caste thing. It’s…more difficult than it looks. Because, even if you support having no castes, people so often carry surnames that reflect caste, or dress or speak or look like whatever caste their family former belonged to. Meh - it seems to carry some of same awkwardness that such things do here. We’re just further down the line with it, and they actually look to us as a model of how to do a republic. But, their former colonies are fully settled states with language and tribe and ethnicity all involved. The general intent is the same, but the situation is a good bit different. I could easily see where some of that could bleed into the Malaysian scene. But they actually sound more like the US, in that they are apparently trying to do the melting pot thing. It actually sounds like a cool place.
I could live without pig faces and be ok, lol.
But yes, I agree. Everyplace has its own flavor of weirdness. Not only in this country, but all the different parts of it with their own little weirdnesses. Actually, we may make a fairly decent model of how that stuff can go wrong or right, since we’ve been at it for a little while and managed to achieve both results so many times, lol. Mostly, sounds like that purposely relaxed pose will probably work out. (She said, from the country where mentions of God and All-Seeing Eyes are still on the currency, and atheists seem to like collecting them, all the same!)
Edited to add: Whoa! How cool would it be if we actually printed piggy faces on our currency! I LIKE it! (No offence to Muslims anywhere - context and meaning would be quite different here.)
Bumpy sounds about right. Probably not that different from our relationship with China. It seems everybody wants to do business with them, but nobody is trying to hang out with them on the weekends, lol.
The thing is, China isn’t only an economic competitor to the USA - it’s an ideological competitor. Both wish for hegemony, with all their hearts. Neither is willing to give any to the other. Problem with hegemony is it’s difficult to segment.
China and Japan have been trading some nasty comments lately. Polishing the war drums.
Ah, but that’s become a grand tradition with China and Japan. I’m really not too worried about China. Because, if we each had stuff the other wanted but couldn’t get, we’d have very major problem on our hands. However, as it turns out, Ol’ Tricky Dick had the right idea there, for once with Kissinger. . (And strangely enough, we domestically the kind of guy who would’ve powered up the NSA and FISA without a second thought. Maybe a whole lot of swearing - but no hesitations, lol . I…hated saying that. But, it’s turned out to be possibly the only useful thing he ever did for this country. Yeesh!)
Who am I to guess what terrorists might get up to?
To be frank, if a journo in Kuala Lumpur over-tweaked someone’s nose, they’d just have them bumped off with minimal fuss and mess. Everyone would understand.
I’d say the ex-colonial nations, and the US, have made themselves more likely to be bombed than the locals, because: They’re foreign, so you wouldn’t annoy your fanbase, and they have a great long history of things to point at that they did to “us as a nation”.
FWIW there are a lot of places on my shit hole list and it has nothing to do with dominant religion. You’d have to pay me a serious sum of money to visit (Putin’s) Russia or Israel as well.
Censorship is one thing that makes me extremely angry and will shoot any country up the list very quickly… especially censorship that is intentional overreach to perpetuate one’s own beliefs, which is what I feel is precisely what’s happened here. The editor wasn’t playing it safe - he was making a religious and political statement.
So if someone is offended by depictions forbidden by their religion, they are therefore extremists, and therefore likely to resort to violence at the earliest opportunity?
