DISQUS

Wow, this is good news. Thanks for the update!

That would almost have to have been from near the top of the Shangri-La, right?

Wherever it's from, that is a nice picture.

Having read their remarks a few thoughts:

1) I had no idea the Virgin Lands campaign was ever tried in Mongolia. It was an unmitigated disaster in the rest of Central Asia, so why talk about doing it again in Mongolia?

2) Everybody says they want to strengthen relations. The US has even said that about Iran and North Korea before. It's an empty phrase. What worries me more is the inter-party contacts between United Russia and the MPRP. That feels too much like an attempt to resurrect the Comintern to me. The Russians must know they ran Mongolia through party contacts in the 20s and 30s, so why not try again?

3) I think the tipping point will be if they ever start talking about "colored revolution," unspecified "extremist elements," or "domestic stability" inside of Mongolia. That, or if the international observers in this election report things like "inappropriate use of administrative resources," which is the big red flag in Russian elections.

4) As for Kalkh Gol, that totally deserves to be celebrated, and it's unfortunate that the timing is a bit screwy. I hope you take pictures of whatever celebrations they put together!

Let us know how the talk goes. Baabar always has a lot to say about a lot of things. Also, in sort of a random aside, how does the Collins measure up to the Oxford-Mansudar?

I heard about this too. The buzz immediately after the first movie was that the next villain would be The Mandarin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(comics) ), who I'm given to understand is a pretty confused mix of stereotypes about "eastern" folk in general. I'd imagine they'll continue in that vein this time around too...

And depending on their definition of "gangster," then I can think of a few dozen UB rappers who would probably love to cross over into acting.

This is a subject that I've been thinking about quite a bit lately, so pardon me as I ramble for a moment:

As someone who has played World of Warcraft on and off for the last 3.5 years (including significant time off for various reasons), and other online games since essentially forever, my take on the topic at hand is that I've played such games through great and not-so-great phases of my life, and that I'm not entirely certain that a cause-effect relationship even exists, as there would with something to which people become "addicted," in the drugs/alcohol sense. However, I suspect that the amount of time I play may be an effect, rather than a cause, of the quality of my life at a given moment, with more during unfulfilling phases and less during better ones, putting me in tacit agreement with you, Steve.

If internet usage, whether youtubing, blogging, or WoW-ing, does have a negative effect, I'd be more inclined to say that it can exacerbate an already bad situation. "If life seems rough, why rise to the challenge when you can just retreat to this other world where everyone has the same interests I do, and where everyone understands me," or perhaps ""Why face the dull daily grind when there's this other reality filled with witty satire, stimulating debate and bright colors," is how I imagine the thought process working when an individual over-focuses on their online life to the detriment of their phsyical one. You probably remember that character from the Matrix, Cypher, who wanted to be "plugged back in" to the green-saturated clean world full of steak and wine where he could be a movie star, rather than face another moment in the grey filthy underground eating gruel and serving a man he felt was mad. Of course he was the odd man out. He was the one who saw "the matrix" not as a tool for work or for education, like his shipmates, but as a way out, an escape. I suspect that he turned his back on his fellow men and women more out of a deep dissatisfaction with the life he led, rather than any particular love for the machines.


My (untrained) understanding of addiction is that it comes in two varieties: psychological and physical dependencies. For the latter, a foreign substance actually alters the way that your body's biochemical whatsits function to the point that they cannot fulfill their normal tasks without the presence of that substance. As far as I know, that makes it absurd to give the label of physical addiction to internet use. For the other title, psychological dependency, I would return to the case of Cypher: an individual convinces themselves that life is either not possible or not worth living without the "addictive" thing in question. In that sense, anything can become an object of addiction, without possessing any inherent qualities that cause it itself to produce addiction. In that case, the problem is, for better or for worse, within the individual. That computer use, game-related or otherwise, would become such an object, is unsurprising to me at all. This brings me back to your original point that having the amount of time spent online be the diagnostic-trigger for "internet addiction," is preposterous. However, I would expand on your conclusion in saying that there is nothing in internet usage that intrinsically makes it more addictive than sudoku, scientific research, or model ship-building, though like everything else it can become the object of serious, and seriously unhealthy, addiction if an individual is at the wrong place in their life at the moment they discover that object.

Anyway, rather than continuing to agree using superfluous wordage, I'll just part with linking a few further-reading articles about "addiction" to World of Warcraft, and one article about a "hardcore" player who has also managed to do great things with his life, though they're all from a source that just might be a bit biased:

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/25/compulsive...

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/20/obamas-fcc...

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/06/10/wow-player...

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/08/14/advice-col...

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/12/11/fcc-comiss...

I'm just glad the Citizens Against Government Waste people aren't in a position to influence anything now. When McCain referenced them in the first debate, I got really worried. Now, thankfully, we don't have to worry about that for at least another four years.

I was hoping the Russians wouldn't do that. That's almost exactly what I was afraid of.

Did he say anything like "it was an attempt at a colored revolution"?

Inner Mongolia is such a touchy issue. What Oyunbileg leaves out is that Outer Mongolia, even through the chaotic years of the Russian Revolution, was squarely under either overwhelming Russian/Soviet influence or direct Russian/Soviet military control. It could not have achieved its independence without the help/support of its despotic and self-interested overlords. He also omits that those overlords were a bit less oppressive than the Qing Dynasty, which imposed a ban on permanent Han Chinese settlement in Mongol/Manchu/Uriangkhai territories, and gave all of those fairly substantial autonomy.

I in no way want to imply that things aren't bad for Mongols in Inner Mongolia, and I recognize that he's basically the only person really putting his neck on the line for them, but the way I look at it is that Outer Mongolia is the exception in that it was barely able to escape while Inner Mongolia never had much chance. The only chance they could have had would have been as a Manchuko-style puppet state (see Wikipedia article on Mengjiang), which would have entailed an alliance with Nazi Germany, and which was ultimately destroyed by a joint military assault by both the USSR and the People's Republic of Mongolia.

Also, if I understand things right, based on my limited knowledge of Inner Mongolian social history, things weren't any better or worse for Mongols than for Han Chinese, Uyghurs, Tibetans, etc, until the establishment of the PRC in the 40s. That is to say, things were pretty indiscriminately horrible for everyone.

Anyway, I don't want to come across as anti-Mongol or whatever. I generally agree that being an Autonomous Region really sucks for Inner Mongolia. I just don't agree 100% with Oyunbileg's description of events. What's worse is that "historical reasons" are the used by China to retain Tibet, Serbia to retain Kosovo, and could be used to advocate for the breakup of countries like Russia, Germany, Canada, and the USA. Very little good comes of such arguments, typically designed to serve the interests of glory-days-obsessed reactionary nationalists, and what we should do instead is look to what the people want today. Unfortunately this would leave Inner Mongolia as a whole squarely inside of China, though vast swaths of its countryside could conceivably be pro-independence even today (or at least 15 years ago, when that map was made).

That was the best damn thing ever. It does not get better than that.

You made my day with that :D

What they've started doing in the middle east to combat the child-jockey problem is introducing robot jockeys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_jockey

This might be a while coming to Mongolia, but it's still a possibility.

Gawd look at all those comments.

I've only read 13 of the ones on your list, I'm sad to say.

Rather than re-hash other peoples' suggestions (like The Martian Chronicles, for example), I'll offer two of my own:

1) A very recent (but still very awesome) one would be "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger. It's one of a very few science fiction books that I feel has both a soul and a real heart. It's also made basically everyone I know who's read it (including people who loathe scifi) break down and cry by the end. Reading it in the middle of a year abroad in a place as far out as Ulaanbaatar really got to me, since it talks a lot about leaving, waiting, and living in the here and now as best you can.

2) Beyond that, one of my biggest favorites would be "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge. Not only was it one of the inspirations for a lot of the mythos of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, it was also had a lot of neat metaphor/allegory regarding the development of the internet, and was generally just a damn good read.

This is exactly what I've been planning to do since December, when the tech people out here in Mongolia told me I'd have to take my laptop to Moscow to repair it (they said even Beijing doesn't have the equipment to fix a motherboard broken in the particular way mine is...).

It just seemed like common sense to me, but I guess it might not to everyone.

I think most international businessmen/women would not go amiss doing a stint in Peace Corps / VSO / AYAD, or whatever their country does, in their target country.

The language training alone, not to mention the culture-specific sensitivity, and the oh-so-enormous network of contacts you get in the host country make it totally worth the two years living for free on the Federal Dime.

Of course, that's if the businessman/woman in question can handle, in the Mongolian case, living in a felt tent, using an outhouse, and a 150-degree temperature range (seriously, -40F for months in the winter and +90F for the summer) for two years without going insane.

My random and unsolicited two cents (adjusted for inflation, of course):

As random as this is, I recently read an interview between Oprah and Pema Chodron, a Tibetan Buddhist nun from (I think) New Jersey (and my apologies if I'm remembering her words incorrectly).

Chodron described existence, as perceived from the Buddhist standpoint, as a monsoon, with endless billions of unique raindrops (moments in our lives) each of which are capable of being experienced individually, though people cannot handle all of them without being swept away by the flood. The goal of the Buddhist, as concerns dealing with existence, in her version, is to know, experience, and ultimately to be each of those raindrops all at once, without becoming lost in the storm.

What you said about raindrops and information made me think of that. I'm not sure how to apply it to the internet and the craziness of social networking, but I'm not sure TMI is a new problem for humanity. Certainly the telecommunications side of it is new for everyone, but perhaps for us in the 'wired' world, the only thing new is having to deal with Too Much Information. People who have dealt with intense suffering in less fortunate places and times won't know what their neighbors had for lunch, for example, but they have to handle crop failures, troop movements, secret police, and a thousand other bits of information, manifested as shells falling in your neighborhood or starving children down the street, that no person should ever have to deal with all at once.

If people can adapt to TMI like that, we can handle the internet. At least we have the luxury of unplugging when we want.

The only web-based applications I use are ones that are integrated inside something else that I already use.

Examples:

1) Event management and messaging inside of Facebook that I already used because I signed up to it once upon a time thinking it would be a good way to meet girls (alas poor misguided fool!), and kept using to keep in touch with people.

2) Calendar, Reader, Blogspot, and the messenging thing, all of which are a quick click away from Gmail which I've used for what must now be a few years since I discovered it was better than Hotmail. (to be honest though, I channel Google Messenger through Pidgin, so that may not count)

Also, about both of these things, they are FREE. This is the major selling point of the webbased applications that I use, though there may also be a psychological laziness thing behind the attractiveness of using things that I can get to through my web-browser (Firefox!) rather than tabbing out and opening a separate application that may take an agonizing two minutes longer to load.

As someone who's about to make a career shift, I think I'll give this one a read.

I don't suppose it had a list of employers who follow the freedom-first philosophy, in the non-neo-conservative sense of course, who also have openings?