From the New York Times comes an interesting story about how the market liberalization of India is benefiting the lower castes, who have been spat on for countless generations.

When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of your cattle, because the care of animals demands children’s labor. Invest in your children’s education instead of in jewelry or land. Cities are good for Dalit outcastes like us, and so is India’s new capitalism.

...

He has the zeal of an ideological convert: he used to be a Maoist revolutionary who, by his own admission, dressed badly, carried a pistol and recruited his people to kill their upper-caste landlords. He claims to have failed in that mission.

Mr. Prasad is a contrarian. He calls government welfare programs patronizing. He dismisses the countryside as a cesspool. Affirmative action is fine, in his view, but only to advance a small slice into the middle class, who can then act as role models. He calls English “the Dalit goddess,” able to liberate Dalits.

Along with India’s economic policies, once grounded in socialist ideals, Mr. Prasad has moved to the right. He is openly and mischievously contemptuous of leftists. “They have a hatred for those who are happy,” he said.

For the rest of the article, not to be accused of being pro-market, the New York Times reporter endeavors to prove that Mr. Prasad is completely full of shit.

From across India still come reports of brutality against untouchables trying to transcend their destiny.

It is a measure of the hardships of rural India that so many Dalits in recent years are migrating to cities for back-breaking, often unregulated jobs, and that those who remain in their villages consider sharecropping a step up from day labor.

Blah blah. Less of you, more of the plucky Prasad, who would probably feel right at home on the ASC forums.

Pot, Kettle, Black.

That's right, you heard it here first. Vietnam II is on its way.

Impossible you say?

Well, I say you are wrong. I think that Vietnam is the perfect contestant to be chosen as the next victim err... lucky winner in the neocon global democracy crusade. Here's how I see it,

1. Vietnam is ruled by an oppressive socialist party dictatorship. This alone means little to those seeking to use war for the spread of democracy, they need a more convincing impetus. Well, they got it. Vietnam has confirmed that they have arrested Cong Thanh Do a 47 year old Vietnameze born American citizen and democracy activist. Do's California congresswoman has said,

"The Vietnamese government has a track record of human rights violations against people who work to bring freedom and democracy to Vietnam through peaceful means...His incarceration is outrageous. I will do everything possible to guarantee Cong Thanh Do's prompt release."

Peaceful means have failed. It's time to bring out the guns.

2. The war makers have access to a large and passionate anti-communist Vietnamese Diaspora that could be called on to fabricate intelligence about WMD programs and to tell hyperbolic stories of torture and human rights violations.

3. The US "cut and ran" after getting their asses handed to them in Vietnam I (which, of course, led to the domino like spread of communism all across the globe.) Unfortunately, according to Bush this "send[s] the wrong message to the enemy. It would tell them that if they wait long enough, America will cut and run. It would vindicate the terrorists' tactics."

The US government cannot afford to look weak especially after 9/11. They must show the world how tough they are, how they will not cut and run and how they will stay in every fight no matter how long it takes to defeat every enemy. Clearly, Vietnam I is a thorn in the side of the American tough guy image.

So, that's it. In my opinion it's not a question of if but when. Bring 'em on!

However, there is one pressing conundrum that Washington's warmongering elite will have to solve. Much of the pro-democracy opposition to the current regime in Vietnam has been labeled terrorists by both Hanoi and Washington. That means that a war for democracy in Vietnam would give aid to terrorists or, conversely, fighting the terrorists would help prop up a violent and oppressive undemocratic regime. How would the impeccable, moral minds of the Washington war crowd ever deal with such a terrible contradiction.

An Indian Catholic organization has called on members to starve themselves to death in protest before the release of the DaVinci Code movie. I think this is a marvelous idea, and that Muslims should take notice and emulate these heroic Christians.

An organization official said, "It's a more Christian way of doing things rather than pulling down things and tearing them up."

Well the Christian way has tended to be to slaughter people as Jesus allegedly dictated, but I guess it's been a couple centuries since that happened on any significant scale. So I guess he's right. Yes, any Christians so offended by a work of fictional entertainment that they lack the will to live, do the Christian thing and starve yourselves to fucking death.

I recently had a conversation with my dad where he opined authoritatively that China's boom would bust because its environment was being despoiled so quickly. I said, uh, European and American cities were putrid balls of toxins during the Industrial Revolution. Then advances came about that fixed most of the problems. The same will happen in China.

So today I come across an article in the London Times about New Year's rice dumplings.

"Ms Wang was happy to queue because she was confident a well-known shop would not try to flout food safety rules, a big temptation in get-rich-quick China."

Hm. It seems the market is on its way to taking care of bad food in China.

"Mr Jiao sold about 70 tonnes of yuanxiao this year — that is 4.2 million rice balls. He boasts that his rice powder taps into a new-found environmental awareness among Chinese consumers. The grains are soaked for five hours and ground for 24 hours in traditional stone mills. Everything is hand-made. His customers seem appreciative. “I prefer to buy ‘green’ food,” one shopper said."

Hm. It seems the market is taking care of bad environmental practices in China.