The Kuomintang candidate for the presidency of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jieou, has won the election by 16 points, 58-42 over the DPP candidate Frank Hsieh, Reuters and other wire services are reporting (plus Taiwanese satellite news channels, which I'm watching.)  This is wider than polls indicated, but polls have been all over the place worldwide recently.

While there have been a number of "pro-green"  (pro-DPP) diarists on Daily Kos, I'm actually inclined to see this as not a bad result. In public policy terms, the two parties aren't actually all that different, and in terms of relations to mainland China, both have nominally different aims but are in fact pro-status quo parties, a good thing, in my opinion. Plus Chen Shui-bian ran the DPP and the government as a one-man show, wasn't markedly honest and seemed to make policy off the cuff. Ma seems reasonable enough, and the minor corruption scandal in Taiwan struck me as beaten up to large degree. The DPP needs time to groom the next generation of leadership, imho.

It's late: on the West Coast, it's 1 a.m., which is late, and on the East Coast, it's 4 a.m, which is REALLY late. Now, frankly, I have an excuse for being awake at this hour: I live in Asia, where it's the afternoon on Friday (Note to people with friends overseas: learn about time zones, UNDERSTAND time zones before calling on the phone). I will soon migrate to a bar, which I'm reliably told is falling down and needs to be propped up for a good part of the evening.

You folks, on the other hand, mainly have to work or go to school tomorrow. Why are you up so late? Won't you be dragging your ass around? How little sleep can you function on, anyway? And aren't you getting a little old for the teenage rebellion thing of staying up late to annoy your parents, anyway?

Anyway, take the poll, and then tell me why you're up so late.

Update: DemocraticLuntz, Georgia10, consider this diary a call-out to you.

I'll keep this diary short. I've just (within the past eight hours or so) received an e-mail from Democrats Abroad with instructions and a password for the online primary that starts tomorrow (well, today for those of us in Australia and East Asia). There will also be in-person voting in major centers with Democrats Abroad chapters. If you're a member of Democrats Abroad and haven't yet received an e-mail, I'd suggest getting in touch with the group headquarters. 22 Delegates are at stake, twice as many as I misreported (and misremembered) in my previous diary. In delegates per likely participate, you're vote will carry MUCH more punch in the DA primary than absentee in your home state primary.

Democrats Abroad will hold its first-ever e-mail based primary on tsunami Tuesday, for 11 delegates. In previous election cycles, Democrats Abroad had held caucuses. This was unsatisfactory because it basically limited participation to major urban centers where there were sufficient populations of Americans...great if you were in, say, Tokyo or Hong Kong, not so good if you were in Kota Kinabalu. Both the new primary system and the old caucus system require you to swear that you're not going to participate in any U.S. primary by absentee ballot.  I should get an e-mail ballot some time before election day. I've not seen any polling on DA leanings yet: If you're a U.S. citizen living abroad, please take the poll in this diary.

For those of you who have been following the situation in Venezuela, Chavez had been seeking to repeal term limits, lengthen his term in office and take other steps that would allow him to stay in power indefinitely and take more of the economy into state ownership. This referendum has failed, by a very slim margin, 50.7% against to 49.3% in favour. From the reporting surrounding the vote, it's clear a lot of Chavez supporters were queasy about giving their guy that much of a blank check, and stayed home.

While I think Chavez has been beaten up a bit much in the U.S. press, I thought that the referendum/constitutional changes were an overstretch by him, and a threat to liberty, and so I'm happy they failed. Any thoughts from you guys?

Update: Chavez is still speaking, and it sounds like he'll try again. He's saying the constutional plan is `still alive.' Yikes.

    For once David Brooks has come out with a column that I, in part, may even agree with a little bit. It's about the fragmentation of music, as part of a great social fragmentation.

Except, of course, this being Brooks he's left out two very important points.

1.) Rap/Hip-Hop IS almost universally popular with youth, white and black, even though it's mainly being made by black youth.

2.) Fragmentation and division are driven in part by economic factors. Greater cohesion probably requires greater investment in public goods, something that's going to require government action and probably higher taxation. Brooks carefully avoids this, talks a lot about foundations. Private charities are helpful but not sufficient for the work that is to be done.

I'm told I'm an atheist. I thought I was an agnostic, but kos user Gong, who's a professional philosopher and should know, tells me that my brand of agnosticism is indistinguishable from atheism. For political purposes, he's certainly right, and I really don't want to write a long diary that attracts long woolgathering philosophical comments. I'm also a hard-edged rationalist and in no way "spiritiual."

In most civilized countries, being an atheist really isn't an issue. Religion doesn't actually come up in public discourse in most of Europe, Canada and Australia, and in most of North Asia most people don't care and it's not a major topic of discussion anyway. You do tend to attract a few god-botherers who really want to save your soul, but steering clear of these folks ain't difficult.

Interesting op-ed piece from the New York Times here on North Korea's official ``pure-blood'' racism. I'm not sure if I agree with it 100 percent -- I reckon that the racial purity rhetoric is more of a tool than a basis of ideology in what appears to have turned into an essentiall nihilistic state -- and I'm also suspicious of anyone who studies North Korea at a South Korean university. That said, I'm open to the idea and it does provide a fresh paradigm for understanding Pyongyang beyond Stanlinism. It does explain North Korea's constant biting the hand that feeds it, China.

Beyond that, I have two reactions: one is that Stalinism is basically a reactionary ideology in the guise of a left-wing movement (hell, if the intellectual right tries to call Nazism a left-wing movement, I reckon I'm entitled to call Stalin a rightist.) Any leftists or fellow travelers on Kos who continue to back the Pyongyang regime, or minimize its offensiveness, should reconsider their position. The internationalism of North Korea has always been week, and now appears to have faded to nil.

There's going to be some interesting political fallout from the North Korean nuclear test, not all of it directly involving the U.S. -- which really can't be blamed for everything that goes wrong in the world all the time.

One victim of the test may be the remaining relationship between Pyongyang and Beijing, once North Korea's closest ally and still its largest supplier of fuel and possibly of food. While the two sides have never been "as close as lips and teeth" as was claimed, China continued to help out North Korea for ideological and historical reasons tied to the Korean War.

China however, wasn't happy about the underground blast, issuing a warning through its United Nations ambassador earlier in diplomatically strong language that it didn't want North Korea to procede with the test. Afterwards China called North Korea's actions ``brazen'' disregard for world opinion. There will probably be more to come.

I recently went through a phase of reading interwar left-wing Chicago novelists, basically James Farrell and Nelson Algren (who has a peculiar, and peculiarly American background). Both were Communists who became Trotskyists -- in Farrell's case quite a right-wing Trotskyist who supported the Vietnam War -- and both were essentially pessimists who nonetheless stayed with the left, more or less, and who wrote about Chicago's lower classes.

Both of them fell out of favor in the postwar period when the kind of realistic fiction they produced fell out of favor and critical plaudits fell more on a newer, less-political and more-psychological group of younger writers. Part of this may have to do with the generally reactionary politics of the 1950s.

One of the things that always amazes me is that there's always people posting on kos, regardless of the time of the day or night. Part of this is a function of the global reach of the blog -- albeit that reach is thinner outside the U.S. than within -- but part of it is that there are a lot of people who don't sleep, or are more addicting to blogging than they are concerned about being well rested.

For my part, I live in Asia (as long-timers may or may not remember), so it's actually mid-afternoon Sunday for me here already. It's actually a nice day out, but I'm stuck inside, so here I am.

One category of diaries I've always loved on kos, and judging by the generally strong reaction, so are other people, are the non-political community building ones. To that end, I'm posting this diary so that people can answer the question posted in the title -- why are you still awake?

There's been a lot of confusion about Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. and port security in the Bahamas, mainly because I think that the media reports on what's happened haven't been very clear. I didn't understand myself until last night what had actually happened and why it's a concern. And as much as I'd like the problem to be chalked up to the administration, or Hutchison (a company that charges me too much for my electricity), or even China, I think in this case it's actually (sort of) the Bahamas' fault.

Hutchison, controlled Hong Kong's Li Ka-shing, the world's 10th-richest man, is among other things the world's largest port operator: it has no ports in the U.S., but it does operate in Asia, Europe (Felixstowe in the UK and Rotterdam amongst other places), Mexico and the Bahamas...including the port of Freeport in the Bahamas, the cause of the current row.

   Careful! Mind you don't slip in the troll drool. And please read through before you start taking a strip out of me.

   When I was very young and even more foolish than I am today, I was a good anticommunist liberal. That's what I really was, even though I thought of myself as a social democrat, or occasionally an anarchist (I was politically precocious). As such, I was deeply thrilled when the mujahideen in Afghanistan, backed by the U.S., started to have success against Soviet troops sent in to prop up the leftist regime that had overthrown the monarchy in that country.

  I share my enthusiasm with my father. To my surprise, he didn't share it.

I recently read The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate by Andrew Dessler, an associate professor in the department of atmospheric sciences at Texas A & M and Edward Parson, a professor of law and associate professor of natural resources and environment at U Michigan. It's a sort of textbook from Cambridge University Press, published last month. This is sort of an odd book: meant I think for interdisciplinary seminars, it includes a bit of climatology, a bit of political science, a bit of economics, even a bit of political philosophy, in its attempt to relay the state of play with regards to the subject.

One of my New Year's resolutions was only to post well-thought-out, well-written, weighty diaries to Kos. So my first diary of the year? Fluff. It's fear of committment, is what it is. If I actually put a lot of effort into a diary and it's hated, or worse, ignored, then I'll be crushed. If people hate this nonsense, who cares.

A few months back I was talking with one of my friends about a party game he'd plaid in which the participants talked about which minor superpower they'd want if they could have any superpower. This lead to me to think about a club for minor superheroes; ones whose powers were too limited to get into the Justice League or whatever. Instead they'd have a cruddy converted warehouse in a former industrial area of town, maybe one that isn't gentrifying because the soil is too contaminated to build on. And they'd all have to hold down day jobs...

I spent some time thinking about the membership list for such an organization. Below are a few of my suggestions. I want to know yours.  Genuine whimsy gets you a "4."

There's starting to be diaries on this blog spotting a lot of ridiculous conspiracy theories about what happened in New Orleans. I think it's important to remember that while the Bushies were clearly criminally negligant in their management of the disaster (and there's enough blame to spread around if you want to rope in the local and state authorities), it is a huge, and unsupportable stretch to go from that to saying the administration somehow CAUSED the disaster.

Not every disaster that hurts people is caused by human agency. Some people have trouble accepting this basic point, however.
After the Asian tsunami there were people (thankfully not many on this blog) who insisted that the seafloor earthquake had been caused by some sort of U.S. magnetic wave machine. This nicely wedded what was essentially magical thinking with a vaguely science fictiony explanation for the scientifically half-educated.

     The effects of Hurricane Katrina may represent a turning point in U.S. political ideology and political culture, but only if we aren't betrayed by stalking horses in our own camp who let the Bushies and their ilk off the hook for us. This could happen, either because they're really on the other side, or because some Democratic politicians may be too stupid to realize that the current situation represents an inflection point where real change could be made  -- and the dice must be cast -- and instead want to butter up the righties for the crumbs of power they receive in return, the sort of risk adverse politics that has damned us since Reagan.

    While I'm normally of the "big tent" school, and have weighed in against the purity brigade elements of the left, this is one instance where there is no space for people in the Democratic Party, and we have to be prepared to attack people at least nominally on our side who are clearly acting as stalking horses. I don't know what it takes to get people from the Democratic caucus, but this is the time for it, if needed.

If you look at scholarship on the origins of the state as an institution -- and there's been a lot of it, mostly based on archaelogical evidence -- it's pretty clear that there were three fucntions of government that convinced people to band together under formal institutions (optimistic historical interpretation) or to accept authoritarian rule by an aristocratic elite (pesimistic, and probably accurate interpretation). Those state roles were:

1. Ending the pervasive communal violence that pervaded prestate societies (see some of the scholarship in murder rates)

2. Irrigation

3. Flood control