http://america.aljazeera.com/article...ts-arrest.html
I can understand why EN wanted to move.
Still have family there, visited a few months ago, actually. I really am a guy watching all this from the outside though, my day to day is the US of A now, obviously.
That country is what it is. Corruption has always been endemic, so none of that is surprising. Believe it or not, it was even worse while I was growing up, with a military dictatorship or not.
Cristina Kirchner’s Misadventure in China
During a visit to China this week, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner paused from her effort to attract Chinese investment to her country, in order to set what may be a new record in racially offensive efficiency: she managed to insult a fifth of humanity in less than a hundred and forty characters. Noting that hundreds of Chinese visitors had shown up to see her at an event in Beijing, she tweeted, “Más de 1.000 asistentes al evento… ¿Serán todos de ‘La Cámpola’ y vinieron sólo por el aloz y el petlóleo?” In other words, she replaced R’s with L’s in “el arroz y el petróleo”—rice and petroleum—and asked, “They came just for rice and oil?” as if speaking with a cartoonish Chinese accent.
President Kirchner may have intended her mockery to be primarily for the benefit of her 3.53 million Twitter followers. She may also be accustomed to a more permissive environment; her right-hand man and confidante, Carlos Zannini, is nicknamed “El Chino” (“The Chinaman”) because of the Maoist leanings he had in the nineteen-seventies. But Kirchner’s “lice and petloleum” comment soon reached the social-media consciousness of China’s 1.4 billion people. The Times, in a story on the controversy, reported that some were baffled. “So this is the I.Q. of a president,” one Chinese user wrote. Some offered objections that were no more admirable than the original insult, suggesting that Kirchner had mistaken them for “Japanese or Koreans.” Others found it most galling that, as one put it, “the president of a trifling country like Argentina” would make the crack while in China asking for money. Kirchner quickly tweeted that she was “sorry,” but, if patterns hold, the affront is likely to linger in the collective mind of the Chinese Web, a realm in which slights to China’s national image have a way of circulating long past the point when they might be expected to expire. In 2008, Jack Cafferty, then a commentator for CNN, made a crack about China being “basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been” for half a century. It was the kind of casual malice that is the mainstay of cable talk, but it took flight in the closed loop of the Chinese Internet, taking on a larger importance, inspiring protests against CNN and online rebuttals directed at the previously little-known Cafferty. Chat with a young Chinese nationalist today and she will likely be able to tell you about Cafferty’s slur.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-...dventure-china
I would like to take umbrage with the president, but my own 'leader' (spit!) is pretty inept with comments too
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote