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#里茲螞蟻批判性思考寫作專欄 #Alex專欄 #外師每週精選閱讀
Yet another horrific accident, yet more finger-pointing and empty apologies, no doubt to be followed by half-hearted promises and ineffective policies. That’s the takeaway from the situation that the author of this week’s article, Michael Turton, sees when surveying the aftermath of Taiwan’s latest disaster. His analysis borrows heavily from Charles Perrow’s text Normal Accidents, which finds accidents to be a normalised part of modern societies that rely on a whole host of complex and integrated systems. In addition to Perrow’s theories, Turton also suggests that these accidents occur from “operating in an atmosphere of intense production pressures and a lax safety culture”; however, of these two, Turton presents the intense production pressures to be the more dominant factor leading to many of these disasters. Thus he seems to suggest that blaming the “operator” – whether it be the train driver, bus driver or power station operator – as somewhat of a cop-out, with higher authorities treating “lowly” operators as scapegoats. #里茲螞蟻批判性思考寫作專欄 #Alex專欄 #外師每週精選閱讀
Are you curious about the taste or effects of chewing betel nuts? Would you chew betel nuts in order to make friends? How about for work? To stay warm? According to a survey of betel nut chewers, these are all significant reasons why people who chew these nuts started their habits in the first place. Perhaps they had fallen for the urban myth about how betel nuts are safe to chew, and so wrongly believe it is the added ingredients that make them carcinogenic. Whatever the case, the fact is that chewing betel nuts with or without additives cause cancer. Where are the public health campaigns educating the wider public about the severe damage to health caused by chewing betel nuts? Some success has been achieved in reducing the number of smokers by putting graphic images on the sides of cigarette packaging depicting the horrendous harm to health that results from smoking, so it makes sense that something similar could be achieved with betel nuts. #里茲螞蟻批判性思考寫作專欄 #Alex專欄 #外師每週精選閱讀
So, what of coal? Nuclear power is a hugely risky source of electricity to be using in Taiwan, but is relying on coal for over seventy percent of electricity production any better? Thermal coal has been a fossil fuel commonly used for power since the beginning of electricity generation, and this is because it has been cheap, and global reserves of coal are relatively widespread and easily mined, leading to a bustling trade and relatively stable supply. So much for the advantages. #里茲螞蟻批判性思考寫作專欄 #Alex專欄 #外師每週精選閱讀
Why is a tiny, densely-populated island located in the middle of an area prone to massive earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis relying on nuclear power to meet its energy needs? First, let us dispel the myths. Nuclear power is not clean, green, or cheap. It still generates carbon emissions over its entire lifespan, and more importantly, it creates completely unusable and extremely toxic radioactive waste that must be safely and securely stored somewhere at huge expense and risk – currently on Orchid Island – with is no viable solution besides keeping it there for thousands of years and endlessly accumulating more and more of it; all the while desperately hoping that no natural disaster or accident will result in that waste leaking out. It really is the most blatant example of ignorantly kicking the can down the road for future generations to endlessly suffer the consequences. #里茲螞蟻批判性思考寫作專欄 #Alex專欄 #外師每週精選閱讀
Are religious people more prone to believing in conspiracy theories? Research has found that they are, and this helps explain why so many believers, along with followers of New Age spiritualism and other assorted “new religions” and cults are more likely to not just put their faith in conspiracy theories such as QAnon, but also actively spread them. Let’s have a look at how two common types of religious believers who are particularly susceptible to trusting in fictions. In the NPR podcast linked to in this post, the speakers talk about the prevalence of trust in conspiracy theories and their spread throughout Christian communities across the USA. In the Guardian article, the author discusses how celebrity influencers in Australia who subscribe to New Age bunk also show a tendency to embrace conspiracy theories and disseminate them amongst their followers. #里茲螞蟻批判性思考寫作專欄 #Alex專欄 #外師每週精選閱讀
The USA is more than happy to sell billions of dollars of outdated weapons systems to Taiwan and claim that it is Taiwan’s “ally”, so why doesn’t the USA prove it and recognise Taiwan as the thriving, free, democratic and open country that it already is? Taiwan meets all of the requirements to be considered an independent sovereign nation, including its own government, legal system, military, economy, territory, and people. Instead of just constantly scaremongering in order to raise tensions and increase arms sales, how about actually working towards regional and world peace by calling a spade a spade. #里茲螞蟻批判性思考寫作專欄 #Alex專欄 #外師每週精選閱讀
It might seem a bit strange to people who are used to getting their news from more traditional sources that the news ban by Facebook caused such a kerfuffle, not just in Australia, but also around the world, as politicians and supporters of free speech overwhelmingly condemned the despotic behaviour of an enormous corporation that has amassed more power and wealth than even some countries. The shocking truth is that many millions of people use social media as their primary, and in some cases exclusive, source of news and other information now. This means that the algorithms, which these tech companies force on users to ensure we are flooded with more of the same content that we are already seeing in order to expose us to as much advertising (“Sponsored”/”Suggested for you”) content as possible, create an echo chamber of ideas. You have no doubt experienced this before when, after clicking on or showing interest in a link in your feed, you are subsequently force-fed similar content continually for the next few days or weeks. #里茲螞蟻批判性思考寫作專欄 #Alex專欄 #外師每週精選閱讀
Following hot on the heels of last week’s warning about the outsized power of big tech companies in modern life, Facebook demonstrated yet again just how undeserving it is to wield so much influence. Possibly at the behest of more traditional media tycoons like Rupert Murdoch, the Australian government decided to pass new media laws that are designed to share with old-media newspapers some of the advertising revenue that Facebook and other tech companies enjoy by freely sharing content that has been created by those newspapers. In a completely disgraceful attempt to force the government to back down, Facebook completely blocked all access to Australian news on their platform for all Australians. #里茲螞蟻批判性思考寫作專欄 #Alex專欄 #外師每週精選閱讀
As FOMO takes hold once again, and people clamber to jump on the bandwagon with the latest social media app sensation (despite it being almost a year old already), security experts are warning that Clubhouse poses serious risks to users. The warnings are focused on at least two ways that users’ privacy is compromised. Firstly, since the company providing the voice services to the app has an office based in China, they are required by Chinese law to share all their data with the Chinese government. In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of Chinese government employees – China’s “cyberwarriors” – whose sole job is to trawl public and private internet communications to track down any instances of speech or behaviour that the Chinese government deems subversive or unacceptable, and then they record all the details of everyone involved, potentially leading to sinister consequences. This kind of mass surveillance is not too dissimilar to how the despicable Stasi in Communist Eastern Europe operated for decades in the past century, but now it is on a much more global scale thanks to the internet. #里茲螞蟻批判性思考寫作專欄 #Alex專欄 #外師每週精選閱讀
In related news, the alleged head of an international crime syndicate, who was purportedly a frequent resident of Taiwan, was arrested in the Netherlands only a few weeks ago. Reuters’ investigative piece details the estimated $17 billion global drug smuggling operations that produced heroin, ketamine and methamphetamine in the Asia Pacific region and distributed it around the world. That the supposed kingpin of this operation has been arrested likely does not signal the end or even a setback for the criminal empire which was created in China and run through Macau, Hong Kong, Myanmar and Taiwan, because as we have seen in past articles, organised crime gangs are so completely embedded in these societies that arresting a few of their members is unlikely to set them back significantly. |
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