(When I write, I believe someone will read it. When millions of people pray, they believe someone will hear it.)
MONDAY, 3 OCTOBER 2022
I am translating the last of the Personal Agenda pieces that I didn’t translate ten years ago. It brought me in close contact again with questions I wrestled with twenty years ago: What should I do with my life? What type of adult life do I want, or need, to develop for myself? And: Should I leave Taiwan on Thursday, 4 March 2004?
Being able to spend hours every day on writing projects was an important consideration in my decision-making process. It was an important factor in 2001 when I was developing ideas about what type of adult life I wanted to lead, and it was an important consideration when I had to decide in the last months of 2003 and the first two months of 2004 whether I was going to go back to South Africa with all my earthly possessions in tow.
As I’ve worked on publishing my writing over the last decade, I often wondered why I never wrote more. One sometimes hears of so-called prolific writers who’ve produced dozens of novels, several collections of short stories, articles, poems, and a few plays to boot. My average for the last ten to fifteen years has been about 20,000 words per year (not counting pieces that I consider unpublishable).
However, if I look at months like September 2003 and February 2004, I see that I wrote as much in those months as I would later write over the course of a whole year. How does that work?! And why couldn’t I keep it up?
Fact is, I only write when I have something to say. If I don’t want to say something specifically, there’s no inspiration.
I also wrote in the February 2004 piece, “Slave to the word”, “I believe I’ll slide into a bottomless depression if I write less.” I have also mentioned many times over the years that I am at my happiest when I’m working on some piece of writing. As the months of September 2003 and February 2004 made clear, writing is a mechanism that helps me to survive. That’s why I’ve never put much effort into marketing my writing, and why I’ve never put much effort into trying to monetize it.
Writing helps me make sense of things. And it has always been a good way to work out solutions to dilemmas in the absence of people with whom I could talk about certain matters, or with whom I could discuss things as much as I deemed necessary.
To summarise: I only write when I need to write. I write to survive.
Seeing as I’m on Twitter almost every day, and have a few of my own products to market, not to mention this site and the Afrikaans version which could always do with some extra readers, I thought it might be good to invest in a course on how to make money on Twitter. The hottest product on Gumroad is a guide called “The Art of Twitter”, available for $89.00 (or if you’re lucky and get it at a discount, $62.00). More than 5,000 copies of the guide have already been sold, so it’s certainly worth considering.
However, I hold back before I press the “Buy Now” button. Here are the reasons:
I have bought many information products. Almost always you are disappointed at the end. Why? Maybe the content is nothing but rehashed nonsense. In other cases, the information is decent enough, and you learn things you didn’t know. What’s the problem then? You complain that you hoped there would be “more information”.
What you really mean: You were hoping on the last page of the PDF would be an incantation that conjures up a fairy who will do all the work for you. Because this is the inevitable next step: Six months plus of mostly boring work before you see any results.
The other reason I’m holding on to my $89 (or $62) is because – so I reckon – you can get most of the content for free if you just search for it on Google (or Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo or Brave). Check out the table of contents: The basics of Twitter; Picking a niche; How to attract followers; Popular tips NOT to follow; Growth strategies; How to create tweets that get likes, retweets, and engagements; The easiest, fastest, and safest ways to make money with Twitter; How to avoid getting banned; How to build a strong network. Then there are the bonuses: How to create and monetize Twitter bots; Growing beyond Twitter (Reddit, Telegram, Instagram, Facebook); a free 3-month subscription to an automation tool; and an archive of 258 of the author’s best tweets. Besides the 3-month subscription (on your own you get seven days free anyway, and after that it’s $12.49 per month minimum), you can find similar information in sometimes long, detailed articles on the first page of Google’s search results – provided of course you use the right phrases and keywords. Similar research can also be done on YouTube, Pinterest, and of course on Twitter itself, where people regularly publish mini articles on the topic.
Wouldn’t it save time to just buy the product? I reckon: Not really. It doesn’t take long to search for information, and you can read five or six different articles instead of getting just one person’s view. And there’s always a possibility that one article will give you additional phrases with which you can search for more information.
Why, when you can get most of the information for free, do people still spend so much money on a set of PDFs?
The psychological factor. You feel if you spend more than a few dollars on something, you will surely jump in and make use of what you learn. Plus, an information product worth a quarter of the retail price will provide you with a plan you can start executing once you’ve read the last few pages (and, to your dismay, seen there’s no incantation for a fairy who’s going to do all the work).
So, what should you do if you want to continue your attempt to make money from Twitter?
Ask yourself when you want to start, because what you’re looking at is a new part-time job. Want to get started right away? Tomorrow morning? Next Monday?
Then you need a plan, preferably in steps: Who is your target market? What topic are you going to focus on? What will you include in your Twitter profile? What type of content will you post? How often will you be posting content? A list of big names in your chosen niche that you should follow, and whose content you should respond to. And so on.
Then, time to do some research.
If you don’t mess up too much, you might be able to buy yourself a new lawn chair in a few months with your accumulated Twitter dollars – or, who knows, perhaps a new car.
Chinese military exercises and encirclement of Taiwan
Sunday, 7 August 2022 was the day I changed my opinion about Taiwan and China. As recently as last Friday, I had a conversation with a Taiwanese businessman about the possibility that China could invade Taiwan. I mentioned that there are people who can explain in detail why such a military endeavour would fail.
After this week’s visit by the US Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and China’s live ammunition military exercise around the island, I realised that Taiwan only enjoys her de facto independence because China has not yet decided to formally incorporate Taiwan.
Barring the Chinese Communist Party losing its governing power over China or changing its dogma, Taiwan cannot do much to change her inevitable fate. China will eventually pull Taiwan into its sovereign territory, most likely without firing so much as a single missile.
The reason? The island has woefully inadequate resistance to encirclement and blockade. (That’s not to mention the power outage that left a third of Taiwan without power and Internet for almost an entire day in March because an employee forgot to do something before he turned on a switch. How hard would it be for a saboteur to do something similar in the future?)
Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in America, reckons that the current Chinese military exercise, which includes more than sixty aircraft and fourteen warships surrounding the island, is indeed a pre-blockade demonstration. According to him, a full blockade would include threats to shoot down aircraft, the placement of sea mines in ports, and the deployment of air and naval forces in a full circle around Taiwan. He adds that this episode is the first opportunity for the Red Chinese Forces to prove to themselves and to Taiwan that they are indeed capable of enforcing a full blockade.
Then there are some other inconvenient facts: 1) According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Taiwan has oil reserves for about four and a half months, but only 12% of Taiwan’s energy is generated locally. About one-third of Taiwan’s electricity was generated by liquefied natural gas in 2021, which must be imported. If China blocks these imports, it could bring Taiwanese manufacturing to its knees within days. 2) Although Taiwan is almost self-sufficient in aquatic products, fruit, meat, vegetables, and eggs, it can meet only 35% of its population’s food needs. (The government did launch a program in the last few years to address this problem, though. The Borgen Project indicates that in 2018, Taiwan spent $4 billion importing agricultural products, but has since built up stocks of essential items sufficient for about 28 months.) 3) Thousands of other types of products are unloaded from cargo ships daily to stock store shelves – items such as clothing, shoes, cat litter, cooking oil, toothpaste, cheese, shampoo, baking soda, medicine, and a wide range of electronic devices and medical equipment. These products make life liveable and enjoyable for Taiwanese citizens and thousands of foreign residents. Life on the island will become increasingly uncomfortable if these products are no longer imported.
Bernhard Billmon writes in a recent article on Moon of Alabama, “China indeed has the capability to completely blockade Taiwan. As the whole area is also under cover of China’s land-based ballistic missiles and in reach of its airforce a blockade is easy to establish and hard to breach.” (My own emphasis) He further writes: “A total blockade of Taiwan would likely bring it to its knees within a few weeks or months. Time that could be used to defeat its air force, air defenses and missiles and prevent attacks from Taiwan on China’s continental assets. China does not have to invade the island. It just has to wait until it is invited to come in.” (Again, my own emphasis)
The New York Times quotes Bonny Lin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington as follows: “If a military exercise transitions to a blockade, when does it become clear that the exercise is now a blockade? Who should be the first to respond? Taiwan’s forces? The United States? It’s not clear.” According to the same article, Eric Sayers, a former senior adviser to the U.S. Pacific Command reckons: “Instead of announcing a military blockade [the Chinese government] may instead announce an extended military exercise around Taiwan that closes or disrupts shipping routes for 30, 60, 90 days. This makes it less a military operation and more a form of legal warfare to justify an indirect blockade for a duration that Beijing can manipulate.”
One of the points that Taiwanese people often make in discussions about Taiwan’s ability to defend itself is that Taiwan might be defeated, but at great cost to China, given that Taiwanese missiles could hit at least one major city, such as Shanghai or Shenzhen, doing great damage to it before the Chinese Red Army silences the weapons.
But will Taiwan start firing her missiles ending thousands of lives on the Chinese mainland because she is surrounded by the Chinese navy? It’s highly unlikely. If it does happen, China will have no problem convincing the world that they had no alternative other than a military response.
Will America or Japan send their warships to force the Chinese navy to end the blockade? Again: A low probability of this happening.
A few weeks or a few months of dwindling gasoline and food supplies will bring hundreds of thousands of people in Taiwan to the streets to force the government to start negotiations. Remember: Between ten and fifteen percent of Taiwan’s population supports unification with China. After a few weeks of empty store shelves, I have no doubt that that number will be a few notches higher.
Despite the fact that encirclement and blockade will cause problems for the population in the short term and will lead to problems in the international supply chain of computer parts, the Taiwanese economy will not be harmed in the long term. I reckon (off the cuff, no data to back it up) that Taiwan will be back to 100% two years after the blockade ends. This undermines another argument that people make about why China will not launch any aggressive actions.
I believe that a large majority of Taiwan’s population is willing to fight for the preservation of the status quo, or for de facto independence. As a long-term resident of Taiwan who is grateful for the home the island and her people have provided me, I also hope that the island and her people will continue to manage their own affairs as they see fit, as they have proven over decades that they are fully capable of doing so, and that they deserve it as much as the people of Japan or South Korea or any other country in the world.
But we live in a world with certain realities. One of these realities is that the Chinese Communist Party believes Taiwan belongs to China, and that they have the right to formally incorporate Taiwan into Chinese territory whenever and however they see fit. Until recently, I thought it meant Chinese soldiers on Taiwanese beaches, and thousands of missiles raining down on Kaohsiung and Taipei and other cities.
The past week has proven that a Chinese takeover of Taiwan need not be nearly as violent. Which makes the likelihood of that happening uncomfortably high.
To summarise:
1. Advocates for Taiwanese independence can make good historical and legal arguments why Taiwan is none of China’s business. More important than their arguments: The Chinese Communist government doesn’t care. It is part of Communist Party dogma that Taiwan is part of China. End of story. Microphones turned off. Debate is over.
2. China can start to take over one small island under Taiwan’s control after another and justify it as part of a new strategy to defend China against “enemies of the Motherland”. After that, they can surround Taiwan for months at a time and call it military and naval exercises. No one to be taken seriously doubts that they have the military capacity, the economic capabilities, and the political will to do so.
3. Taiwan can defend itself against an invasion where Chinese troops storm the beaches, and where the Chinese air force rains bombs on Taiwanese cities. But how does Taiwan defend itself against a salami technique where China takes one small island after another with overwhelming force, and then surrounds the island with perhaps three dozen warships and a thousand missiles on the Chinese coast to protect the ships? How long will Taiwan be able to hold out? How long before raging Taiwanese hunger forces the government to negotiate with Beijing?
Any solutions?
Who am I? A fellow at some international think tank, or a senior academic at a renowned university? No, and no. Nevertheless …
Taiwan has spent a fortune in the last few decades on weaponry in the hope that they can do something when Chinese troops storm the beaches on Taiwan’s west and north coasts. There are the high-accuracy missiles that could wipe Shanghai and maybe one or two other Chinese cities off the map. (Let’s ignore for the moment what Chinese propagandists and an all-too-willing Western media will do with video clips of burning children in the rubble of a crushed apartment building in Shanghai. Not to mention cries of revenge among the Chinese population.) There are also ultra-modern warships, military drones, and brand-new F-16 fighter jets.
What value will this advanced military equipment have if Taiwan is encircled for months in extensive “military exercises”? Are all these fighter jets and warships and drones and missile systems going to convince international airlines not to cancel flights to Taipei? Will it convince shipping companies to take a chance to try and break through the blockade to deliver toilet paper and cat food and baking powder and olive oil?
The problem is that Taiwan, and the US government pushing the Taiwanese government to spend billions of dollars with US arms manufacturers, are preparing for a battle that will probably never be fought. Why would China risk thousands of Chinese troops, billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry, and possibly a few Chinese cities if they can succeed in their decades-long goal with blockades, encirclement, and the sabotage of infrastructure? Then the Chinese Red Army is also guilty of what the deputy head of the Taiwanese Ministry of Defence’s Political Warfare Bureau calls, “cognitive warfare, disinformation campaigns, and rumor spreading”, as well as “‘fake news’ or misinformation, mostly seeking to lower public trust in Taiwan’s government, [to] undermine public morale and build momentum for unification by force”.
Aljazeera reports that Taiwan has a defence budget of more than $20 billion for 2022. What percentage of this budget is allocated to the development of more agricultural land for food production? How much has been budgeted to teach city dwellers to plant vegetable gardens on the roofs of thousands of apartment buildings? How much money is spent on protecting infrastructure from sabotage? (Remember again: in March, a third of the island was without power and large parts without Internet for most of the day because someone made a mistake with a switch.) How much money is spent combatting cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns and other cognitive warfare?
The fact is, Taiwan is a David spending billions of dollars on a highly advanced slingshot with a pile of explosive stones in preparation for a fight against a Goliath who is not stupid, and who probably won’t do what David wants him to do so that he can sling a stone into his forehead. What will David do if Goliath unleashes dozens of wild dogs that surround him and cut him off from his food supply and other resources? What will David do when he has swallowed his last crumbs of bread with the last drops of water in his sachet? And Goliath still refuses to come closer so that David can hit him on the head with a stone as the story is supposed to go?
If Taiwan wants to continue to exist as an independent state in practice, they will have to start spending those billions of dollars much better than just filling the pockets of American arms manufacturers.
Afterthought: Thursday 22 September 2022
Taiwan has three options:
1) Declare independence, wait for China’s response, and hope for the best.
2) Contact Beijing and say: “Enough is enough. Let’s work out the technicalities of reunification.”
And 3) Adhere to strict status quo, meaning Beijing does not interfere, but Taiwan makes no declarations of independence nor does anything beyond practical arrangements, such as maintaining trade offices/embassies, to disturb the status quo – this includes no high-profile visits from American politicians.
As it is now, the Tsai Ing-wen administration is walking on the edge of formal independence, and if China protests, the Taiwan government accusesBeijing of violating the precarious peace.
Because if you keep trying, you keep sending out a signal: “I’m still here.”
How else will happiness find you?
(Recent thoughts on the role of luck, and keep trying versus giving up; various social and other media reports of people winning millions in lotteries – and you can’t be lucky if you didn’t buy a ticket; a video clip on Twitter of someone whose parachute failed – he falls to the ground, keeps jerking and pulling on ropes and finally he cuts something loose and his emergency parachute opens to break his speed seconds before hitting the ground; also a video clip of a group of men stranded for days on a small island (looked more like a sandbar), with one guy continuing to wave a big green flag even after rescue personnel in a helicopter noticed them.)
11:24
“Why keep trying? It’s not going to work anyway…”
Say what? Why use that as a criterion? It’s not so much about working. It’s about sending out a signal!
“Many people are successful because they were lucky – the right things happened at the right times, and so on, without them doing much themselves. In other words, other people did similar things, or worked just as hard, but the time was wrong, or the stars just weren’t aligned at that moment.”
Let’s say you’re right.
But how will luck find you if you don’t play? How are you going to get lucky – time is right, stars are right – if you are not active at that moment?
FRIDAY, 5 AUGUST 2022
Not just luck in the general sense of the word.
Perhaps you feel you’re not so much an unlucky person, but in love you just haven’t hit the jackpot.
So: If you stop sending out signals, how will love find you?
Or maybe love has found you, but you could definitely do with more money.
Same story: If you stop sending out signals, how will money find you?
Was the South African government policy known as Apartheid evil, as many people think it was?
The idea of separate development, that Zulus have their own territory that has historical value for them, with their own government that makes decisions on matters that are important to Zulus, or that solves problems in ways that are consistent with the values with which most Zulus identify, with Zulu cultural organizations and schools and universities, and then the same for Xhosas and Sothos and so on, is either a workable idea, or not realistic considering the realities of the South African economy and wider society.
But is it an evil idea? I reckon, no.
The evil entered the story with how the policy was carried out in practice, the way in which the National Party government reacted to resistance to their policy, and the deeply biased thinking that served as the foundation of the ideology.
The policies implemented by the government eventually included the forced removal of communities from neighbourhoods where people of different races had lived together for decades; the requirement of identification documents that only black adults had to carry on their person, without which they could be arrested; laws that prohibited black people from entering urban areas unless they could prove they were employed in the area; a ban on marriages between members of different population groups; a restriction on where black entrepreneurs could open businesses; and the segregation of public areas and facilities, public transport, as well as schools and universities, with the result that black South Africans generally experienced a significantly lower quality of life than white South Africans.
How did the government respond to opposition to their policies? They responded with lethal force against protests, jailed the leaders of the resistance, and banned civil rights organisations.
The most nefarious of the Apartheid government’s deeds, however, was to apply a type of psychology and a type of philosophy that told the adult black population: You are less of a person because you are black. You are worth less than the white man and woman on the other side of town who are just as old as you, just as smart (or stupid) as you, who also love their children. You’re worth less than the white people – because you’re black. Education in schools also made it clear to black children that their futures were not as engineers and dentists and architects, but primarily as labourers and servants of white people. Hendrik Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs from 1954 to 1958 and later Prime Minister of South Africa, said about the education of black children: “[There is] no place for the Bantu in European society above the level of certain forms of labour. What is the use of teaching mathematics to the Bantu child if it cannot be used in practice?”
Not only were black children neglected in their formal education, adult black men and women were also systematically reminded of their second-class status in South African society. Young white police constables could stop middle-aged black men and women in the street and demand to see their “papers”. Black children were given Afrikaans or English names that were easier for white people to pronounce, and if the adult black worker did not have an Afrikaans or English name, he or she was given one. White men had to be addressed as “Boss”, even if the black man or woman did not work for the white man. Until as recently as the late nineteen-eighties, black men and women were not allowed to use public transportation intended for whites or were only allowed to use third-class seats.
Steve Biko, circa 1970s (Source: Unknown, copyright is owned by the Steve Biko Foundation)
All these measures were applied to entrench the idea that the white person was the master and the black person the servant. When black intellectuals like Steve Biko from the sixties onwards wanted to promote the idea of Black Pride, when they wanted to popularise the idea that an adult black man and woman should raise their heads and insist on dignified treatment – that they should indeed believe that they were the equal of their so-called white masters, these leaders were brutally oppressed. Steve Biko himself was first intimidated, then arrested, and finally assaulted so badly that he succumbed to his injuries. His offense? A radical message to both white and black: “[As] a prelude whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior.” And: “The first step therefore is to make the black man come to himself; to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth.”
It is at this point – where you want to crush the spirit of someone because he disagrees with your political policies, to want to break his will so that he will never again think of rising against you, that any reasonable person should realise he had crossed over to the Dark Side: Welcome to the Land of Lucifer.
