What Happens When You Confront Chinese Secret Police?

This. The reporter then asks for the "regular" police for protection, who, shockingly, don't show up. One approach: next time, might be worthwhile telling the regular police that there are "Falun Gong hooligans" harrassing foreigners trying to spend money, just to see the look on the regular cops' faces when they arrive.

Meanwhile, in a fun report on General Motors in China, GM "gratifies the Party orally" in a CCP propaganda film.

How to Measure Ideologies

From a post at my atheist blog:

The existence of dissidents is a fair acid-test for whether there is actual logic underlying the ideology, however monstrous its manifestations in the real world ever became; in the barks and howls of race- and personality-driven dictatorships it's not clear what "dissident" could mean, apart from diametrically opposed. To my knowledge there has never been a North Korean hetero-ideologue driven from the Kim family's inner circle to exile with artists in Mexico, to scribble furiously about how his version of Juche was the pure one, and the Kims had perverted it to their own ends. The same is true of the Nazis: without Germany and its late iron age tribal chief, there could have been no grounds for schism.

Full post is here. It reflects a point I made earlier that discussions of cultural preservation or serving an ideology or political system only to preserve that system are badly and dangerously missing the point of how we should live; bottom line, cultures can't suffer but people can. Plus the new post features a rare disagreement with a Hitchens piece.