One-upmanship

 

It’s always amusing to see tired old political tricks being played out by someone with little imagination or original thought. 

The Taipei Mayor seems to be having a fine old time of running through his well-thumbed copy of 101 Gags To Play On Your Political Opponents. You can imagine that horrible little smirk he often wears crawling across his face when he finds one he thinks might work. 

Although the reality is he is bereft of ideas and is simply going through the motions of indulging in a ruse he thinks people won’t immediately see through. He is wrong. 

His latest idea of separating diners between smoking and non-smoking - sorry, between vaccinated and non-vaccinated - is such a classic case of one-upmanship as to be glaringly obvious to even the most intellectually challenged. 

The comparison is a fine one as just as smoke drifts around a restaurant, the virus will too if an infected person sneezes or coughs. One top of which an infected person might touch a door handle, use the toilet, touch a tray and the infection is passed on. It is clearly just a daft idea. 

What he is doing is just trying to go one-up on the Health Minister. His thought process would go something like this. “People need to think I am smarter than anyone else in the current administration if I want to become President. So I have to counter everything they do with an idea of my own that will impress people.” Hence this latest idiotic idea of his. 

One-upmanship is designed to fool people into thinking you are better than them or another person. It is a very tired and worn-out political game and needs to always be disregarded. 

The Taipei Mayor really needs to stop copying other people’s techniques and ideas and come up with good original thoughts and analysis of his own if he wants to be taken seriously in the political arena. 

Tinkerty Tonk...

《高人一等的情結》

看到缺乏想像力或原創思想的人玩陳舊的政治伎倆總是很有趣的。

台北市長翻閱著他那本書頁起毛的《101種把玩政治對手的噱頭》，似乎非常自得其樂。你可以想像，當他發現一個他認為可能有用的方法時，他經常掛在臉上那種恐怖的得意笑容就會出現。

儘管現實是他沒有想法，只是沉迷於詭計之中，但他認為人們不會立即看穿。 他錯了。

他最新的想法是將吸煙者和非吸煙者區分開來。。。抱歉，他要在餐廳裡區分接種疫苗和未接種疫苗者，就是一個典型的高人一等心態，這即使對智力稍弱的人也是顯而易見的。

這種比較很好，就像煙霧在餐廳內部飄蕩一樣，如果感染者打噴嚏或咳嗽，病毒也會傳播。感染者可能會接觸門把手、上廁所、接觸托盤，然後病毒就會傳播。這非常明顯只是一個愚蠢的想法。

他正在做的是試圖對衛福部長進行反擊。他的思考過程會是這樣的：如果我想成為總統，人們需要認為我比現任政府中的任何人都更聰明。所以我必須用我自己的想法來反擊他們所做的一切，這會給人們留下深刻印象。

因此，他這個最新的愚蠢想法出現了。

One-upmanship 旨在愚弄人們，讓人誤認為自己比他人更好。這是個陳腔爛調的政治遊戲，需要徹底被忽視。

台北市長要想在政治舞台上受到重視，真的需要停止複制陳腐的伎倆，並提出自己的好的原創想法和分析。

Tinkerty Tonk... 掰掰。

Black and White Elections

In the main, us voters usually have to decide on a range of issues come local or national elections. The economy, foreign policy, healthcare, education, taxation, crime, roads and transportation, immigration, climate change, nuclear and energy policy, in fact a whole range of issues which we weigh and balance in our minds before casting our precious vote. 

However, it seems Taiwan is heading the way of the United Kingdom, and the forthcoming local and national elections will become more about voters casting their ballot with a single issue dominating all the others. 

The last election in the UK, for example, was all about Brexit, nothing else mattered and pretty much the entire political discourse during the campaigns was about Brexit. It’s still a major topic, mainly because it has been such an utter disaster, but Boris Johnson fought the last election on the basis of Get Brexit Done… and he won, convincingly. 

From what I hear the opposition parties are saying, the forthcoming Taiwan local elections next year, and the national election in 2024 will be fought pretty much on the single issue of China. The fact is the current administration is doing such a good job there is little else to dispute.  

Like the ex-Kaohsiung Mayor, who promised to bring in Chinese money, the latest utterances by Eric Zhu after Xi Jinping rushed-to-gush at his gaining the KMT Chairmanship, demonstrates just how close the KMT will bring Taiwan towards China. His comment that he “will seek common ground and respect differences, increase mutual trust and integration, strengthen exchanges and cooperation, and allow the peaceful development of cross-strait relations to continue” is telling. 

I really don’t like “integration” and “strengthening exchanges and cooperation” which likely means a flood of tourists if the KMT gain power, at the very least. The KMT would, like the ex-Kaohsiung Mayor, promise untold riches by allowing China more access to businesses and investment here and encouraging floods of Chinese tourists to ruin our national parks.   

It would seem to me that Taiwan politics is polarizing around keeping the current status quo and full democracy, or gradually being absorbed by China and ending up like Hong Kong, or worse.

Reading between the lines of various KMT and TMD statements, their administrations would  play into China’s hands in return for favours and, more likely, the support China would give them to keep them in power. Most likely, these would be economic to begin with. 

So, just like the Brits voting for Brexit Boris, my fellow Taiwanese residents will face similar single issue ballots in the coming months. 

We have elsewhere discussed the issue of age when it comes to voting patterns. In the UK, older people tended to vote for Brexit because of a misguided and rosy view of England’s past colonial glories. Older people with safe pensions and houses long paid for and no real worries, other than occasionally moaning their doctor could not see them at the exact time they wanted. 

I see the same pattern in Taiwan and it’s worrying. It is why it is vital young people get out and vote, otherwise the older generation will be making decisions that will affect the young when the old ones are long dead. 

If I were on the DPP’s campaign management team I would be pushing a slogan of “A vote for the opposition is a vote to do away with democracy in Taiwan and become like Hong Kong.”

The coming elections are a stark choice for voters. If you don’t want democracy any longer, vote for the opposition. They will surely sell you into the hands of Xi’s China. 

Tinkerty Tonk…