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Don't Be Evil Audiolibro Por Rana Foroohar arte de portada

FB and Google are evil because they were in China.

Total
1 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
4 out of 5 stars
Historia
1 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 11-06-22

I liked her book Makers and Takers; but this book was just unbearable.

To accept her logic you have to start by accepting the neo colonialist propaganda that China, a historic victim of Western imperialism, is "evil". Then you have to accept her false premise that FB and Google operate in China. Because of that false premise, FB and Google are also evil, particularly since (and she picks a random anonymous comment online) someone somewhere said a bad thing about China, about FB, or about Google.

She should have stopped after her first book. China bashing works in American election politics but it doesn't work in writing about serious subjects.

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The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong Audiolibro Por Gyalo Thondup, Anne F. Thurston arte de portada

Polemic blaming everyone. Not believable

Total
1 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
2 out of 5 stars
Historia
1 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 01-02-22

Thondup is not a religious fanatic. He is an unhappy and angry power-wealth fanatic. He is boastful, critical of others, and laudatory of himself. He blames the CIA, China, India, but not the shamefully cruel Tibetan theocracy of which he was a part, from which he had greatly benefited financially, and for which he desperately wished to continue. There are so many internal contradictions to his story that even his ghost writer had to go on record in saying she did not believing his story. For instance, while saying he was "just a poor Tibetan", he boasted that his family owned the largest house in town and feted all the theocratic luminaries that came to town. He boasted his uncle was connected to the previous Dalai Lama, had "10,000 camels", and that his grandmother was so sure that her son would be chosen as the next Dalai Lama, that she "died of grief", when that did not happen. Of course, Thondup made the choosing of his younger brother, as the 14th Dalai Lama, to be a divine, fair, redistributive, and egalitarian process; rather than a clearly opaque, phantasmagoric, and corrupt process, likely fought out among the Tibetan theocratic elites whose cruelty, greed, and dishonesty he described in detail at other times in the book when he chose to be critical and when he considered them his enemies.

While he said that China's "military invasion" of Tibet was an incomparable cruelty against the Tibetan theocratic elites, wherein "ordinary people" sadly lost hundreds of serfs and huge tracts of land and luxurious estates; he also said only around 120 of those resisting elites were injured or died in the process. He said that the majority of the Tibetans were joyous of the China's land reform, redistributing land to the 99%, and joyous of the outlawing of serfdom, and the government's forgiving of all debt contracts, most of which extended generations into the future. Contradicting his previous assertion, Thondup did let slip that a historic agreement was signed, months earlier in Beijing by the Dalai Lama, that allowed for a peaceful entry into Lhassa of the government troops, without a single shot being fired.

While saying that China was "lying" and that there had never been any imperialist power in Tibet, he also detailed British and CIA operatives living in the area, manning the only wireless connection to British India and from whom he had derived assistance in getting to and from India.

Although Thundup admitted to being a poor student most of his life, who enjoyed spending money on luxuries; it seems he would have at least done a few Google searches in preparation in writing a "historic book". He claimed that Tibet has always been independent of China and of all foreign powers. He claimed the Tibetans are completely different genetically and by language from the Chinese. Robert Ford, who lived in Tibet at that time and who was mentioned in the book, had blamed the Tibetans for never having asked to be "independent" or declared Tibet to be independent (see youtube). Genetically and language-wise, Tibetans are the closest relatives to the Han Chinese in the world. The first King of Tibet had married the niece of the emperor of China, in the 7th century, and had declared on a stele, which is still in Lhasa today, that "the two peoples will forever be one". That first Tibetan-Chinese empress also brought Buddhism to the Tibetan king, and is now considered a Buddhist deity in Tibet. Thondup also missed that Britain had invade Tibet in 1903 leaving in 1904 with an coerced, unfair, signed treaty from Tibetan elites, requiring a large extraction of silver.

I watched many of a huge trove of private Youtube, Tiktok, and Bilibili productions about Tibet. It seems to me Tibetans in China, are living a much more modern, egalitarian, secular, educated, and prosperous lives than the resisting Tibetans still living under theocratic rule in India. While it may be true that centuries of Buddhism indoctrination, made the common Tibetans, in the 1950's, unable to accept any denigration of the Tibetan theocratic elites whom they had been taught to revere and to obey; denigration of Han elites was probably even more common and more severe, in those day, in an extremely impoverished China, after a century of foreign military aggression and foreign financial extraction, desperate for egalitarianism. I think history has already spoken in favor of the 1950's the government's decisions in land redistribution to the Tibetan serfs, and its decision in bringing Tibetan theocracy under modern secular laws.

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Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order Audiolibro Por Ray Dalio arte de portada

Probably the most accurate read of China

Total
5 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
5 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 12-26-21

Nicely done for such a gigantic subject -- China, U.S., macroeconomics, geopolitics, and the future of the world -- all in one nutshell.

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