Friday, August 25, 2017

Links 25 August 2017

Delhi govt imposes blanket ban on manual cleaning of sewers, offenders to be booked under culpable homicide
Parents Still Lose Sleep Worrying About Grown Children, Study Confirms "Seidel says that this trend along with the emergence of technology like cell phones and social media, gives parents a deeper insight into what is going on in their adult children’s lives, which may lead to more cause for concern."
Brazil: Slaves To Fashion - Latin America Investigates At 23:00 "You end up wherever you can. As long as that option exits people will take it......I think that it is very difficult to end this type of system because many workers aspire to become sweatshop owners"
A review of “Merchants of War and Peace: British knowledge of China in the making of the Opium War” by Song-Chuan Chen by Salvatore Babones "Despite its focus on the run-up to the Opium War, Merchants of War and Peace is in the end neither a book about merchants nor a book about the war. Merchants and the war merely form the backdrop for a very profound book about the power of knowledge.
In Chen’s telling, the Canton system “dictated China’s perception of and relations with the Europeans” in ways that led to its own undoing. A system designed to keep foreign trade flowing while the foreigners themselves were kept at arm’s-length set up a century of foreign invasions—economic, cultural, and military. Could a more outward-looking China have staved off the depredations of the “century of humiliation”? Chen is too much the academic historian to speculate, but global engagement has certainly worked wonders for 21st century China. We can only wonder what might have been."

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