Hello, World, I'm back

Did you even miss me?

Thanks to one of my colleagues, I now have access to the Internet again – the whole thing and not just some declawed cat. I’m now facing my old dilemma of what to do with this blog which has been so idle for so long. My WordPress blog remains my main blog with my LJ one in the wings. Apart from those two I have a couple of others for my more specialised interests, but they need not concern anyone apart from me.

The first difference I note is that YouTube videos are appearing on websites where they have, until today, been missing. It’s not that I was a massive fan of YouTube, but it is a blasted sodding nuisance to miss out on the video part of some online article because of a bunch of mean-minded, miserable sods. In fact, I’ve started calling them joy vampires because they want to suck as much happiness as they possibly can out of everyone else’s lives.

I see over on Language Log, Victor Mair has posted an entry about the use of the phrase “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”. The phrase, as Mair notes, is overwhelmingly used with reference to China. As I’ve observed before, the only people who seem upset is the government, who are a bunch of infantile, lying scoundrels. (Oops! Slightly messed up number agreement there.) Mair professes not to understand what the phrase is all in aid of, but I think the answer is easy.

Unlike Britain, where we still mock the Germans for losing the war, but in a good-natured way (I hope), China has this tendency to paint itself as the eternal victim. Instead of poking fun at the Japanese for losing World War II, the Chinese are still in a monster-sized strop that that Japanese had the effrontery to invade them in the first place. It’s another illustration of the humourlessness which blights China.

The bitter irony is that if you looked at Chinese history and asked, “Who has killed the greatest percentage of the Chinese people throughout history?”, the answer would be the Chinese people themselves. They are their own worst enemies and I doubt whether the Tibetans, the Mongols, the Turkic peoples of central Asia or the Japanese have killed anywhere near the number who have by and large been unjustly slaughtered by warlords and corrupt officials down through the dynasties. Thus, if they start whining about how they’re the victims of someone else, ignore them.