The explanation: Reconciling democracy with liberalism is really hard: since people are illiberal by nature, there is usually a trade-off between the two. The more frequent result is Semi-Liberal Democracy (describes most “Western” countries), which in turn can degenerate into a full-blown Illiberal Democracy (as did Russia around 1993, or the US and Hungary around 2011). Oligarchy is meant in the sense of rule by a few. It should be noted that some legislation ostensibly enacted to protect the public interest, such as libel laws, surveillance laws and anti-terrorist laws – in practice serve more to undermine liberalism. When they go too far, there appear Semi-Authoritarian states of permanent emergency. In the lower rung, Authoritarianism consolidates all political power unto the state (Semi-Authoritarianism tries to, but isn’t as successful). Totalitarianism extends the political realm over all spheres of life, bringing us into the realm of (Viereck’s) Metapolitics.

Liberal Democracy

• Iceland – In the wake of its post-financial crisis constitutional reforms, this small country may claim to have the most direct democracy on Earth.
• Netherlands
• California (state government)
• Germany
• Finland
• Sweden – Not as high as it might have been due to the politically-motivated prosecution of Assange.
• Spain
• Czech Republic

Semi-Liberal Democracy (tends to be corrupted by moneyed interests and/or other influential interest groups)

• Canada – A good democracy, but a whiff of a downwards trend under Harper. ↓
• Belgium
• Italy – Not a personalistic regime once Berlusconi left, but not helped by the fact that an appointed technocrat now runs it.
• Portugal
• Australia
• Brazil - Arbitrary power structures; extra-judicial murders.
• France - Paternalistic; corporatist surveillance state; discrimination against minorities. ↓
• Chile
• Estonia – Has excellent Internet democracy ideas, but is hampered by discrimination against Russophone minorities.
• Japan - Paternalistic; ultra-high conviction rates; no gun rights; but ceased being an (effectively) one-party state with recent election of DJP. ↑
• Bulgaria
• Mexico – Drug cartels challenge to the state may lead to curtailment of freedom. ↓
• Switzerland – The last canton only gave women the right to vote in the early 1990′s, and the banning of minarets restricts religious freedom.
• UK - Corporatist surveillance state; repressive libel & PC laws, regulations; no gun rights; strongly trending to Illiberal Democracy. ↓↓
• India - Strong tradition of debate & power diffusion, marred by caste inequalities, privilege, political cliquishness, bottom-up free speech restrictions.
• South Korea - Paternalistic; surveillance state; restrictive regulations, freedom of speech restrictions.
• Poland
• Indonesia
• Latvia
• Colombia – Pursued illiberal policies vs. FARC, but transitioned to a Semi-Liberal Democracy with recent transfer of power. ↑
• Romania ↓
• Argentina – New sweeping media laws bring Argentina close to the bottom of the Semi-Liberal Democracy rankings. ↓
• Ukraine - In “anarchic stasis” since independence; arbitrary power structures; recently trending to Illiberal Democracy. ↓

Illiberal Democracy (tends to feature oligarchies and personalism)

• USA - Highest prison population; corporatist surveillance state; runs transnational Gulag; increasingly arbitrary power structures; despite strong freedom of speech protections and surviving separation of powers, it can no longer be considered a Semi-Liberal Democracy after its formal legalization of indefinite detention under the NDAA 2012. ↓
• Armenia
• Israel - Severe national security-related civil liberties restrictions; growing influence of settler & fundamentalist agendas over the traditional Zionist foundation; severe new NGO laws, and discrimination against Palestinians makes Israel a downwards-trending Illiberal Democracy. ↓
• Hungary – The recent Constitutional reforms in Hungary have effectively ended separation of powers, constrained the media, and established a basis for indefinite one-party dominance. It is now the only EU member to qualify as an Illiberal Democracy. ↓↓
• Russia - Super-presidentialism with no real separation of powers; arbitrary power structures; surveillance state; and as recently shown, elections are subject to moderate fraud. However, new reforms (e.g. opening up of the political space), technical measures (e.g. web cameras at polling stations) and permits for opposition protests at the end of 2011 portend an upwards trend.  ↑
• Venezuela – Increasingly illiberal, especially as regards media laws. ↓
• Thailand
• Georgia - Arbitrary power structures; opposition protests broken up; main opposition candidate to Saakashvili stripped of Georgian citizenship.
• Algeria
• Turkey – Maintains severe restrictions on free speech (a country that has the world’s largest number of imprisoned journalists, many under bizarre conspiracy charges, can’t really be any kind of liberal democracy); ethnic discrimination; arbitrary power structures; paradoxically, both authoritarian & liberal principles strengthening under influence of Gulenists & AKP. ↓

Semi-Authoritarianism (tends to feature permanent states of emergency)

• Egypt – Despite the revolutionary upheaval, the military retains wide influence and shoots at protesters in Cairo; this cannot be a democratic state of affairs. The future is uncertain. ?
• Libya
• Pakistan
• Singapore - Overt political repression; repressive laws (esp. on libel); surveillance state.
• Kazakhstan - Overt political repression; Nazarbayev is Caesar.
• Azerbaijan – Overt political repression; Aliyev is Caesar.
• Belarus - Elections completely falsified; overt political repression, and getting worse. ↓
• Iraq - ↓
• Iran - Overt political repression; though Velayat-e faqih has embedded democratic elements (under formal clerical “guardianship), in recent years, the system is strongly trending to Authoritarianism as the IRGC clan tries to wrestle the old clerics out of power. ↓

Authoritarianism

• Vietnam
• China – Overt political repression; no national elections (but exist at village level & in some municipalities); the Internet is restricted by the “Great Firewall”, but print & online getting freer to discuss issues unrelated to a few unacceptable topics (e.g. Communist Party hegemony, Tiananmen, etc); may implement new form of political model of “deliberative dictatorship”; trending towards Semi-Authoritarianism. ↑
• Cuba - Overt political repression; pervasive Internet & media censorship.
• Uzbekistan
• Syria
• Saudi Arabia - Overt political repression; pervasive censorship; very repressive laws; political Islam permeated everyday life, esp. in regard to women’s rights; one law for the Saud family, another for the rest.

Totalitarianism (the realm of metapolitics)

• North Korea – Not much to say here.

Generally speaking, I’m skeptical about the more grandiose claims of foreign involvement in the discontent. But the White Ribbon does seem to fit the bill: It’s a nice memorable meme (i.e. a good revolutionary symbol), it’s site is under a .com domain, etc. But there’s one problem – whichever idiot came up with it didn’t bother tracking down its negative historic connotations. So no wonder it hasn’t really been catching on (despite the best efforts of our good friend Edward Lucas).

I was contacted by RT after they noticed my post on why OWS isn’t happening in China and Russia. As befits a program aimed at an American audience, however, the conversation revolved around the prospects for OWS solely in the US. In particular, as winter approaches and media attention wanes, will the Occupy movement be able to remain relevant to its 99% constituency?

Unfortunately, as it was my first time on live TV, I did not manage to make the best impression – as the interview went on, I could not prevent stammers and pauses from beginning to infest my conversation. So apologies for that.

* It is easy. VERY easy. I have been studying it for three days, and I can already say many phrases: e.g. the one in the title (“Esperanto is the easiest language in the world”). Its vocabulary is about 60% Latinic, 30% Anglic-Germanic and 10% Slavic; its grammar is simplified Latinic; its morphology and semantics are largely Slavonic. Being a natural language, everything is very logical, it is entirely phonetic and there are no exceptions. Root words can be easily transformed from verbs (add in “i) to adjectives (add an “e), an adjective (add an “a), a place where it is done (add “ej”), a professional who does it (add “ist”), a female version (add “ino”), a diminished version (add “et”), a magnified version (add “eg”), etc. For people with some familiarity with European languages, the vocabulary is a piece of cake. It will be a lot tougher for Asians, but nonetheless even for them it will still be an order of magnitude easier than starting from a natural language.

* Despite its easiness, I’m discovering Esperanto is very flexible. In a sense, even more so than languages like English or Chinese, which are largely bound by the Subject-Verb-Object structure. Though I may change my mind as I get more advanced, so far it seems to me to be as flexible as Russian, which is amazing considering its grammar is orders of magnitude simpler. Quite frankly, of the languages I’ve looked at it in any detail, it is my favorite by far (the full rankings: Esperanto; Spanish; Russian; Latin; Chinese; English; French; German).

* Why learn it? First, there are studies showing that students who spent a year learning Esperanto were able to assimilate French and other languages quicker thereafter, eventually overtaking the control groups that didn’t study Esperanto. Only about one year max is needed for Esperanto fluency. But there are accounts of some people accomplishing it in days. There are monthly meetings of Esperantists in the Bay Area. I’m planning to attend the next one, and I already feel I won’t be embarrassed to open my mouth. By then I will probably be far better at it than at Chinese, which I’m studying for the fourth month now; a depressing thought, that.

This brings us to the second reason why Esperanto is awesome – it would make for an excellent global lingua franca. That was the original intention of Zamenhof, its late 19th century inventor, who growing up as a Jew in Russian Poland envisioned language uniting people. Knowing Polish, Russian, German, French, Hebrew, Yiddish, English, Latin, Ancient Greek and a few others, he was eminently qualified for the advancing his vision, and Esperanto today is by far the most popular “artificial” language. It is also the only one with a truly global culture, with strong communities throughout East-Central Europe, and in Russia, China, Japan, and California.

Third, the members of this community are almost invariably going to be more interesting than the average person (them having taken the trouble to study an artificial language for what are mostly intellectual or idealistic purposes). It has strong historical associations with movements for world peace, socialism, environmentalism, anti-imperialism, civil rights, and other progressive causes. And most of the maniacs of the 20th century like Hitler, Stalin, and imperial Japan hated it, which I guess is also a recommendation of sorts.

In today’s world, it would behove the Rest to adopt it to undermine the ideological hegemony of the West, which seeks to dictate its values to the rest of mankind. For instance, consider India, where English is kind of like French was in 18th century Russia. A way for the Indian comprador elites to rub in their social dominance by association with a “superior” foreign culture into the faces of the peasants and workers. The solution is people’s struggle and an end to linguistic imperialism, which can be achieved by making Hindi the sole official language, providing support for local languages, and teaching Esperanto as a medium for communication with the outside world.

* There are many criticisms of Esperanto. Many of them are unwarranted. For instance, some people say that its grammar is still too hard. I disagree. If you make it simpler, the language will begin to lose a lot of its current expressiveness and flexibility. It will make it even simpler for learners, thought it’s already extremely simple, but at what I perceive to be great linguistic expense.

I will focus on two valid criticisms. First, the number of speakers is very low. Of those who are truly fluent, there are no more than one million in the world; perhaps another ten million can speak it somewhat (whom I joined in the past week). There are several reasons for this. The biggest one is that nationalism has always fatally gotten in the way of its widespread adaptation.

Back in the 1920′s, the French vetoed a League of Nations initiative to make Esperanto the international language of diplomacy. Their logic was that French was a uniquely perfect language and good enough for everybody. Then it got displaced by English after 1945, and no doubt the French are now ruing their choice. Is anyone in any doubt whatsoever that the French would much rather now be speaking Esperanto than English?

But the Americans now have the same attitude of linguistic chauvinism. They assume they will be at the top forever, and so will their language. China will beg to differ. And if the gap between them gets big enough, Chinese will become the new lingua franca, despite its difficulty. And then it will be the Anglo-Saxons seething at the cosmic injustice of it all.

At least Esperanto is based on European languages, so it makes all the more sense for the West to promote its use.

The second reason for the low numbers of speakers constitutes a classic chicken and egg problem. You can’t have many people who want to learn it before you have a large number of speakers. The only way for this to be resolved is for the government of a large and important country to expend substantial resources on teaching Esperanto, but why bother when no-one else has? In this respect, it’s like global action on climate change – benefits are magnified only when everybody else does it. But just like cutting carbon emissions which leads to greater energy efficiency and less dependence on oil supplies, however, teaching Esperanto also provides net benefits – as mentioned above, it makes the acquisition of other languages easier, as students who master Esperanto feel more confident and linguistically aware. Once a critical mass of Esperanto speakers is reached, its spread should become self-perpetuating – for instance, if just two of the BRIC’s countries, like Brazil and India, were to implement it, many people elsewhere would learn it just for the business and travel opportunities. Recently, a plan to free schools to teach Esperanto was passed in the Brazilian parliament.

Third third reason is that there have been a number of “dissident” minorities from Esperanto who have pushed through their own reforms. One of them resulted in the language Ido, with a simplified grammar. But these movements are not sustainable, because they in turn will beget their own sectarians, resulting in numerous warring factions that negate the entire purpose of having a World Language in the first place. The lesson is that for international success, petty grievances and annoyances with the language as it currently exist must not be allowed to undermine the united front of the Esperanto movement. In other words, Esperantists who regard their language as something greater than just their personal intellectual plaything must act on the basis of democratic centralism – they can feel free to debate policy and direction, but they must respect the majority will. This isn’t my own ideological quirk. J.R.R. Tolkien, a conservative, recognized the same thing back in 1932.

* The second big problem as I see it is that the default gender of a noun is masculine, which although uncontroversial in Zamenhof’s days even among progressives, is becoming increasingly politically incorrect today. For instance, a “patro” is a father, unless specified to be a mother by making the word into “patrino”.

One stopgap solution is to just treat the current masculine gender as a neutral, and have the reader specify its sex from the context. But this is too awkward. One suggestion for reform, implemented in places but as yet unsupported by the central Esperanto authorities, is to reclassify all nouns ending in -o as neutral, while designating -oĉo as a masculine suffix in line with -ino as the feminine. There are several other possible solutions, but I prefer this one the most. My own addition would be to also add female-specific words for common terms like mother (“patrino” to “matro”) and sister (“fratrino” to “sororo”).

Implemented under democratic centralism, I do not see this becoming a divisive issue. All languages evolve in tandem with social progress, leaving behind “archaic” remanents. Why should Esperanto be any different?

* In Chinese, Esperanto is literally “World Language” (世界语).

* Books I use include Esperanto – Learning and Using the International Language, by David RICHARDSON, and I am soon getting Being Colloquial in Esperanto: A Reference Guide by David K. JORDON. Practice can be acquired through meetups with local Esperantists. This is a good dictionary.

* Because it is still a fairly marginal language, there are few original novels or films in Esperanto. It is up to Esperantists to maintain hope – that is, after all, what the very name of the language is derived from – and to work to change this state of affairs.

1. Most other languages now look really easy, especially Spanish which I’ve long planned to learn but never really found myself sufficiently motivated to do so. The time it takes to memorize one Hanzi is probably sufficient to memorize 5-10 Spanish words.

2. Speaking of Hanzi, this test estimates that I know about 700-800 of them. This puts me about half-way to becoming a barely literate Chinese peasant. Or, in foreign language acquisition terms, either a high Low Intermediate or a very low High Intermediate.

3. There’s an extremely useful I found called Remembering the Hanzi. As I already figured out for myself, the most effective way to do so is to memorize stories specific to Hanzi (the more graphic, funny and/or obscene the better). This book provides stories and templates for stories for the 1500 most frequent Hanzi. Now that formal classes have ended I’ll probably be systematically working through it.

4. THAT SAID, its not as bad as that. As I’ve taken care to emphasize throughout there are many mitigating factors to Chinese that make it far easier than what it’s sometimes held out to be. For instance… On the one hand, remembering Hanzi is hard, and the fact that 99%+ of the words have no connection to the Indo-European makes vocab difficult for European language speakers. BUT! As words are based on syllables, often just one, two, or at at most three of them (anything above three is very rare) means there are far less components to memorize for each word; furthermore, and this is VERY IMPORTANT, every syllable stands for an idea that very often connects deeply with the meaning of the word it is used to create. So, for example, an office is 办公室 – the first character means to handle or manage; the second means public; and the third means institution. All very logical.

Place names and people names are all different, by virtue of the fact that exact or near-exact transliteration from Western languages into Chinese is impossible by dint of the latter’s limited set of syllable sounds. This is very frustrating, because to truly master Chinese, one has to also master the Chinese perceptions of all other world cultures. To take an example, if we want to talk about Vladimir Putin, we can be fairly sure that his name will be more or less the same across all European languages, with some minor variations like “Wladimir” (De.) or “Poutine” (Fr.). Not so in Chinese, where his name would be pronounced Fúlājīmǐ’ěr Pǔjīng. If you don’t know that and just say his Russian name, I would imagine most Chinese wouldn’t know what you’re talking about.

PS. My own Chinese name is 林安德 / Lín’āndé.

PSS. Speaking of Putin, my congratulations on his recent discovery of Atlantis off Russia’s Black Sea coast. He is truly a god among men.

5. About half the Hanzi are the same in both Traditional and Simplified script, plus in many cases the changes are pretty minor. However, they are more complex, and small changes may confuse more than they help, so learning both sets is – I would estimate – perhaps 50% more work. Reading older texts and getting a deeper appreciation for the language required some knowledge of Traditional, so I’ll be doing that.

One silver lining to the cloud is that Traditional Hanzi are the same as Japanese kanji. This massively simplified the process of learning Japanese to someone who knows Chinese. Perhaps I’ll diversify into Japanese once I move from Low Intermediate to Advanced in Chinese. No, Scowspi, not because my Sino-Triumphalism is waning.

6. A linguistic gem from the third best site on the Internet (exile.ru is first, this one is second), Cracked: Chinese Words Don’t Sound Cool in English.

Unfortunately, while Japanese names look pretty cool written in English (Akira, Kamiko, Yakuza, Chicken Katsu Bento), Chinese names sound pretty lame (Yun-Fat, Chee Hwa, Haier, Egg Foo Young). My own Chinese name is Porchin, which using the modern pinyin system, still comes out to an unglamorous Buoqing. You want to name yourself “great king”? Have fun being “da wang.” Sometimes immigrants get lucky when their last names transliterate into something cool, like, “Fang,” but more often than not, they will end up like our family friends, the Poons.

The pinyin system really doesn’t help the coolness factor by introducing all those Q’s and X’s. (Pro tip: They’re pretty much just “ch” and “sh” respectively.) Instead of sounding exotic and mysterious, I sound like a really desperate Scrabble cheater.

But another reason to study Japanese! Will no doubt provide a wealth of good names for the fantasy series I will write in my glorious literary future.

7. Speculations on lingua franca. Many people believe that English will remain the world’s lingua franca long past the time the US cedes economic primacy to China (of course, many people deny even that will happen… but by this point such thinking can only be described as delusional). I was long in agreement with this, on the basis that:

1. Chinese is really hard.
2. Authoritarianism doesn’t go well with soft power.
3. Inertia: it will take ages to change. See Latin in post-medieval Europe, or the lingering influence of French.
4. The Anglo-Saxon cultural bloc, by which I mean the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and a few minor others has a population of 450mn; a population that per capita will remain richer than China’s for the foreseeable future.

I still think these are valid factors, but several qualifiers need to be mentioned. First, the hardness element is overrated. Hanzi are hard. Writing in pinyin (with the option of automatic Hanzi conversion); reading pinyin, or even Hanzi (with the help of instant translation software on cell phones); and speaking, are quantitatively no more difficult to master than fairly simple European languages. In fact, typical “Business Chinese” courses focus only on the speaking and pinyin parts, foregoing the Hanzi element entirely. I think that at least in this sphere Chinese has a chance of becoming a global (and not only a regional) lingua franca by the 2040′s or so.

There are likewise some mitigating factors for the three other points. I’ll be developing this theme in more detail once I get to the China section of my coming book on the global future.

(1) Too many bad books with bad predictions. Most of them aren’t interested in the future so much as projecting their own tropes and agendas on a conveniently blank slate. This characterizes the rampant doomerism of Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, any number of Panglossian tracts by technological utopians, and George Friedman’s breathless odes to American power in The Next 100 Years. I can do a better job.

(2) The more I dither, the less original and counter-intuitive my vision becomes. The rise of China as the premier superpower, or the concept of “peak oil,” were fringe ideas back in 2008. Now they are coming into vogue, at least on a sidelines; and in a few more years they will enter the conventional wisdom.

(3) It is a project I will find interesting and fun.

So, that is what I will be working on in the coming months. I expect it to be ready for electronic publication before the new year. You can track my progress by the bar to the right (provisionally, it will have 120,000 words).

Just to give you an inkling of what it’s all about, here’s a random sample of chapters. They all exist in outline form.

• Introduction: Forking Paths
• Chapter 2 – The End of Pax Americana
• Chapter 3 – Thermoeconomics
• Chapter 6 – The Geopolitics of Scarcity Industrialism
• Chapter 7 – The Widening Gyre
• Chapter 9 – Eschaton
• Chapter 12 – Arctic Ecumene

Sound interesting?

Eventually this form the basis (that is, ancient history) for a fantasy series I have planned for a long time. But all good things in moderation; I’ll leave the details for later.

1. In case you missed a late update to the original post: “Because of the simplicity of the grammar, Chinese often feels like slang to speakers used to more formalized languages; i.e. slang such as ebonics. A good example is Hǎo jiǔ bù jiàn (好久不见), which literally means “Long time no see.” Apparently it made its way into Anglo slang through Chinese immigrants in San Francisco…”

2. Many Chinese province names are amazingly literal. For instance, Shandong (山东) means “east of the mountains”; Hebei (河北) and Henan (河南) mean north and south of the river, respectively, while Hubei (湖北) and Hunan (湖南) mean north and south of the lake; Guangxi (广西) and Guangdong (广东) refer to west and east widths, respectively; Yunnan (云南) has connotations of south clouds; and the island province of Hainan (海南) means south sea. Likewise for cities. Xi’an (西安) is the western peace; Shanghai 上海 means “on the sea” (sort of like Приморье?); and, of course, the various jing’s denote capitals. So Beijing (北京) is the north capital, Nanjing (南京) is the south capital, and Dongjing (东京) – otherwise known as Tokyo – is the east capital. The very name of the country is literally the “Middle Kingdom” (中国).

3. A friend (and 同学) recently told me that when he was traveling in China this past year, he came across a group of schoolchildren on the train out on a school excursion. They were eager to practice their English and they spoke surprisingly well. This wasn’t Beijing or Shanghai, but a relatively rural backwater. This anecdote supports the contention made on this blog that human capital in the youngest Chinese generations is at least as rich if not more so than in the West – what percentage of Americans can fluently speak a second language? – and as such this guarantees the country’s rapid future development.

It is a very studious and test-based culture. You can see this on a recent BBC series on the Chinese school system. Many foreign critics, as well as many Chinese themselves, argue that the focus on group and rote learning undermines individual creativity and stunts individual development. (That is partly why so many aspire to send their children to Western universities like Oxford or Princeton). To an extent they have a point; certainly, given the rapidly diminishing returns to studying more than an hour or two per day (as the brain can only absorb so much), spending all day in the classroom or library is very ineffective, almost idiotic even. That said I would argue that even that system is still superior to what passes for education in many schools in Latin America, where it seems little gets done or taught (see PISA scores); and increasingly, in many Western countries (where the focus on individual creativity and self-esteem has reached such ridiculous levels that they directly get in the way of learning basic facts and skills).

4. Western (and Russian) conceptions of time envisage it as going from left to right. The Chinese envisage it going from top to bottom; for instance, next week is literally “below” or “downwards” week. This is more accurate, reflecting the law of increasing entropy.

5. Just for yalensis. This poem is a good illustration of why alphabetising the language really is a bad idea.

《施氏食獅史》
石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。
氏时时适市视狮。
十时，适十狮适市。
是时，适施氏适市。
氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。
氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。
石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始试食是十狮尸。
食时，始识是十狮，实十石狮尸。
试释是事。

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

6. At least in the US, many Chinese restaurants have different names in English and Chinese. For instance, the “Great China” restaurant in Berkeley is actually called “Bountiful Harvest Year” (丰年) in Chinese. Westerners and legal documents know it as “Great China”; the local Chinese community knows it by its Chinese name.

According to street wisdom, in some cases this discrepancy arises out of the desire to avoid paying taxes. Competition is stiff, profit margins are low, and any advantage helps. Once the IRS latches on to a restaurant, it changes its English name and reconstitutes, while its Chinese-name “brand” remains intact. (Obviously, in no sense am I implying that “Great China”, which is a famous and long-established institution, engages in this practice. It is mostly small eateries in America’s Chinatowns).

7. Just as Westerners think of the Confucian cultures as “Asian”, “The East”, “East Asia”, with little accounting for differences between Vietnamese and Koreans – let alone Fujianese and Manchurians – so do many Chinese bracket in Italians and Americans and Swedes as belonging to a monolithic “West.” This can come across in language. For instance, the entirety of what we think of as “modern” medicine is known as “Western medicine” (西医) whereas traditional Chinese remedies relying more on acupuncture, herbs, etc. is “central medicine” (中医).

8. The Chinese name for San Francisco is literally Old Gold Mountain (旧金山).

1. Tones. In stark contrast to every major European language, Chinese pronunciation is based on tones. Four of them: one that stays high, one that rises high, one that dips then rises high, and one that falls sharply (there’s also a neutral tone). Very confusing at first, though I’m sure Vietnamese is worse.

2. Hanzi. The written language is based on hieroglyphs, each of which represent an idea or concept that can either stand alone or be combined to form a word. Some of these can be pretty inventive, e.g. a computer 电脑 is composed of the characters for electricity and brain; or to take an older example, a conscience 良心 is literally a “good heart.” A panda is a “big bear-cat” (大熊猫).

The characters themselves can be full of meaning. E.g. the heart (心) plays a big role in many related concepts, such as interesting, lit. “has meaning” (有意思) or “read aloud” presumably with ‘all your heart’ (念).

Or to give a fundamental example take “your honorable name” (贵姓). The first symbol, honorable, has a conchie shell in the bottom half; in ancient times, they were used as currency, and seeing as “honorable people” were those with many conchie shells, hence the character (this association of wealth with honor is intrinsic to all cultures; consider, for instance, богатый (rich person) and a богатырь (hero)). The second symbol, name, combines the characters for woman (女) and the interrelated concepts of life, birth, and livelihood (生); one possible explanation put forth is that ancient China was matrimonial, and names passed down the mother’s side. The Hanzi “to rule” (治) is intimately connected with the idea of managing water, as indicated by the radical for water at the left. These examples can be multiplied indefinitely; suffice to say, the etymology is fascinating.

In the vast majority of cases, the meanings aren’t clear and you have to invent your own if you want to stand a chance of remembering the Hanzi. Random example – the character for Korea (韩国). Being the geopolitics freak that I am, I remembered the first symbol by imagining the top as the North and the bottom as the South. On the left side of 韩, the two sides are separated by a minefield; on the right side, the curl on the southern side indicates that South Korea is the stronger of the two. Of course, after this remembering the symbol for the game of go, or wéiqí (围棋) as it is known in Chinese, became much easier; the left symbol represented a battleground, e.g. like that of the Korean peninsula, but confined to a square board.

I might be weird that way but associating hanzi with something edgy or mildly degenerate can be more effective. E.g., take the character for “want” (要); the lower half can be associated with “wanting” a woman (女). This in turn can make the first character for “pretty” (漂亮) much easier to remember, as the top part of 要 is the same as the top part of 漂. It also has a water radical, so you imagine that woman as a water nymph. The “measure word” (more on that later) for class periods is 节; the symbol at the top of it stands for grass, and can be memorized by thinking about how much you’d rather be smoking it than going to class.

3. Grammar. Is very easy. Almost baby speak. No real past or future tense; perfectly valid to say “Next Thursday I go to play pool.” No gender; even “he” and “she” sound the same, though the Hanzi are slightly different (他, 她). No dative or genitive or objective or those other cases they torture you with in German or Latin (or Russian, for that matter, though never having had a formal Russian education I was lucky enough to escape that). That said usage of the element that indicates completion (了) can get quite tricky when forming complicated sentences. Also, though there are no plurals, when you want to specify a quantity of something, you have to add what is called a “measure word”, so, for example, if you want to say three pens you say 三枝笔, which is the character for three (三), followed by the measure word (枝), followed by pen (笔). There are different measure words for different objects; in this case, 枝 is the general measure word for long and inflexible objects. This can make life difficult, though thankfully in most cases the measure word 个 is standard and will suffice. Nonetheless, grammar is probably an order of magnitude easier than English (let alone Russian or Japanese). It is an incredibly direct and straightforward language.

4. I largely agree with David Moser’s Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, but I think that he exaggerates a lot. In particular, in today’s technological society there are a lot of IT tools that easen the problems he identifies.

• Pleco is an app for the iPhone (and coming soon for Droid – can’t wait) that is really, really cool. You point you phone’s camera at a character, be it on paper or on a computer screen, and it translates it for you and gives it to you in pinyin. A must have if you go to China.
• Perapera-kun (Mozilla) and Zhongwen (Chrome) are popup dictionaries; hover your mouse over a character in your browser, and pinyin and definitions come up. As David correctly points out using a paper dictionary is very frustrating.
• Our bustest bud Google Translate.
• You have to pay a small monthly fee for it, but Skritter is really useful for assembling lists of Hanzi and studying them. There is an option in the aforementioned Zhongwen program to automatically add words that you look up with it to Skritter with a single press of a key button.
• You should, obviously, install a program that converts pinyin (the Latinized script) into Hanzi. Windows has it as an add-on.
• IN ADDITION: Commentator Glossy below also recommends Zhongwen etymology dictionary and Anki flash cards.

5. There is a big debate on the efficacy of Simplified vs. Traditional characters. I’m a firm supporter of Simplified because it is much easier, shorter, and – Traditionalist propaganda to the contrary – in many cases simply more logical. Granted, there are a few changes in Simplified that were idiotic and destructive. For instance, the character for love is 爱, missing out the heart radical that is in the Traditional 愛. This kind of removes the whole point. And 電, with its rain symbol at the top (i.e. associated with thunder, lightning) is a better character for electricity than the Simplified 电. But a few cases like this aside, Simplified is better.

6. Some weird cultural quirks. The word for comrade (同志) has gone from being a standard form of address in the 1950′s to only being used by a few elderly stalwarts and formal Communist Party rhetoric… and the country’s emerging LGBT community! Mao wouldn’t be happy. Apparently, a “red book” (红书) now denotes pornography; I don’t if that has any Maoist connotations. For a man “to eat tofu” is to take advantage of his female friends, so guys, don’t run around being cheesy.

EDIT 7/7:  An additional observation. Because of the simplicity of the grammar, Chinese often feels like slang to speakers used to more formalized languages; i.e. slang such as ebonics. A good example is Hǎo jiǔ bù jiàn (好久不见), which literally means “Long time no see.” Apparently it made its way into Anglo slang through Chinese immigrants in San Francisco…

Environmentalists push to keep U.S., others from oil drilling in Arctic

Okay, who am I kiddin’? It’s awesome for propping AK i.e. yours truly over well deserving others. ;-)

On a more pertinent note, despite the lack of recent posts I remain fully committed to Arctic Progress. However, RL priorities have sidetracked me from its active development for the time being; it isn’t a project I want to do in a half-assed way. Rest assured, it will not remain in limbo.

Of course, to do this sustainably you need to maintain a positive rate of expected winnings, which is impossible with most casino games. For instance, even under optimal play, the house will always a retain a wafer-thin advantage in blackjack (unless you count cards, but casinos have caught on to that nowadays). The biggest exception is poker. Though luck is very significant for the first few hundreds of hands, the effects of skill begin to predominate after c.15,000 hands in Texas Holdem No-Limit.

My experience of poker, until recently, came from the odd home game and the one or two times I bought in at a casino table. I was pretty crap at it. I limped in with hands like K7 offsuit and went all-in chasing straight draws. But a few months ago, one of my net buddies pointed me to a thread in a forum he used to frequent, in which a Las Vegas hustler recounts how he started playing online poker and ended up making $100/hour by the end of the month. Then soon after I came across Tim Ferriss’ concept of the 4 hour workweek, and exploiting geoarbitrage – the art of earning money in high-income countries and spending it in cheap, low-income ones where one can live like a king on a US minimum wage. I added two and two, realizing that online poker has potential for a great synthesis of these principles; if you earn $200 in a day playing online poker, then you could spend the rest of the week lolling on the Thai beach in style and comfort. All you need are skills and a reliable Internet connection. I had all the Internet I wanted, but acquiring the poker skills was going to take a lot more work.

One of my friends, who dropped out of university a while ago to become a professional poker player – he earned $250,000 in the last fiscal year – recommended that I start with the classic in the genre: The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky. I didn’t get much of it in my first read, but one thing did stick with me as encapsulating the meaning of expected value (EV) that underlies all poker calculations.

Lesson #1: The Fundamental Theorem of Poker:

Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose.

I started trying to actively apply the lessons of the book to my play. I went from being a negative EV, or at best break-even, player in home games, to making substantial winnings. But it is hard to improve from playing in home games, because of their infrequency, the amateurishness of play, and above all the slow pace of the game – you can play 5x+ as many hands in one hour by playing on two tables online as you can in a live home game. Not only is the intensity of learning low, but another personal problem is that slow low-stakes games make me tilt, i.e. play sub-optimally because of boredom. It was time to go into the interwebs.

The mother of all bad beats.

I could not have picked a more inauspicious moment. I deposited a $40 investment on April 14th. The day after, on the poker world’s “Black Friday,” the FBI shut down the three biggest poker sites operating in the US: Full Tilt Poker, Poker Stars, and Absolute Poker.

Fortunately, I made the right call – at least for now – by placing the money into Bodog, one of the few sites that continues to service US players. A few of my friends weren’t as lucky and have up to several $10,000′s in limbo.

Lesson #2: As an online poker player in the US, your property rights aren’t secure. More generally, there are Black Swans in poker just as in life, and capitalism.

Nonetheless, at this point, I’m driven not by pecuniary motives, but by the desire to improve my game. I spend my first two weeks, first going up, then down, and breaking even. I typically played, and continue to play, half an hour to an hour per day. It’s almost as interesting as writing about peak oil and geopolitics, and certainly far more profitable!

Lesson #3: The importance of bank roll management. $40 is only good for the lowest-stakes 2/5c games offered at Bodog. To make a reliable cushion for the 5/10c games, something closer to $100 is preferable. Anything higher and you’ll need well more than $100.

Grinding at the SNGs.

What are the three characteristics of the successful poker player? In my opinion, they are iron discipline, theoretical mastery, and lots of practice. They are three legs of a tripod, as any two by themselves aren’t enough to win. In greater detail:

1. Discipline. The discipline to fold second-best hands instead of calling to the end; the discipline to recognize tilt and move away from the tables if you can’t suppress it; the discipline to avoid calling raisers who you suspect are bluffing just to “see their cards”; and the most germane, at least for me, the discipline to avoid getting bored and playing too many bad hands. Good play can win with suboptimal hands, but there’s a limit to it – even the world poker champion with a KK on the preflop is an underdog to an amateur with an AA.
2. Theory. Some degree of ease, if not mastery, with poker theory is essential. The math itself is pretty easy, but there are many marginal situations in which the right decision, as per the Fundamental Theorem, is hard to identify as it will vary based on position, relative bankrolls, player temperaments, history, and a host of other factors. Having a good grounding in pot and hand odds, and expected value, is enough to be a positive EV player at the micro-stakes; but among experts, these margins are the boundaries between mediocrity, and fame and glory.
3. Practice. Play 100,000′s of hands, it’s as simple as that.

After two weeks, I established that I was best (in terms of expected winnings) playing two 6max tables at 5/10c. My winnings began to soar… and then they crashed.

I hope it will keep doubling in perpetuity.

So WTF happened on May 7th, 2011? I got a bad beat, on both tables, within 5 minutes of each other. My Two Pair A-high lost to a back-door flush on an all-in, then my K-high Three Of A Kind, all-in on the turn, lost to a Full House made on the river. Despite being a big favorite to make big bank when I enticed my opponents all in, I ended up blowing $20.

Needless to say, I was very happy about it.

Lesson #4: The better a player you are, the more “bad beats” you will experience, because your opponents can only win with Fortuna’s intervention.

What is luck? It's the discrepancy between expected and actual winnings.

By then, I had began using a trial version of Poker Tracker to analyze my game. This allows us to graph actual amounts won and net expected amounts won. Note how sharply the two diverge, twice, at around the 260th hand, in the graph above. But you might object: “These “Sklansky bucks” aren’t going to buy me any value meals!?” Not now, no. But in the longterm, as per the laws of probability, the real winnings and expected winnings will inevitably converge.

Fail to internalize this, and you will eventually lose.

Of course, my journey is only begun. My hourly rate for the past two weeks is a meager $3.50 per hour, and it wouldn’t have made minimum wage even had I not experienced those bad beats that set me back $20 in five minutes. To earn a decent salary, in my estimation, one must learn how to maintain a positive EV while multi-tabling the 100/200c games.

Lesson #5: The insights drawn from playing poker can be productively applied applied across life. See the following articles:

• Poker Is Good For You (David Sklansky)
• Poker And Capitalism (Anatoly Karlin)

I will continue writing about my experiments with poker in the coming months, and I hope it will be of interest to S/O regular readers. It’s not exactly the type of “job” that you can read about anywhere.

A short note on ethics. Some puritans (many of whom do not understand the game) condemn poker – it doesn’t produce anything useful; it fosters addiction and destitution; it corrupts morals; etc. All these criticisms have simple rejoinders. First, as an “entertainment” (or “financial transactions”?) industry, it might not produce much in the way of the public good; and yes, the suckers and “fish” who gamble without paying attention to bankroll management or expectations can and do go broke. But no-one is forcing them to play at gunpoint, so how exactly does it differ from the finance industry, or capitalism in general? At the very least, corrupt politicians don’t force taxpayers into providing free or subsidized rebuys for losing poker players. Those are reserved for Wall Street.

Second, the government has a vested interest in demonizing the gambling industry as it constitutes an alternate source of wealth, and hence independence, and a way for some people to escape the strictures of time and place imposed by wage slavery. Hence, it is logical for the forces of pro-regulation collectivist statism to unite with corporate neo-feudalism and the moralistic rhetoric of the Right to further advance its tyrannous agenda.