Bill Gate will have a dinner in his dinning room with a baby-eater from China.

[Colin McGregor]

--- Paul King <pkpking3 at sysympaticoa> wrote:

> > Gee... It sounds like the story was taken straight
> out of the
> > Protocols of the Elders of Siam...[1]
> > 
> 
> Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of
> Jonathan Swift's "A Modest 
> Proposal". This is Jonathan SwSwifftardonic essay
> come to life. Only, Swift was 
> joking.

Well, sort of. At the time Jonathan Swift wrote "A
Modest Proposal" (1729) because of laws the British
had passed regarding Ireland, and a poor harvest, a
sisignificantart of Ireland was looking at starvation.
Swift couldn't do much about the harvest, but he could
do something about the laws. So, Swift's approach was
to create an uproar by in essence writing that since
these children were about to die anyway, might as well
eat them.

The whole essay can be seen here:

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

Further Swift does get in a mention regarding Asia
(what is now known as Taiwan was at that time known as
Formosa):

"But in order to justify my friend, he confessed that
this expedient was put into his head by the famous
Psalmanazar, a native of the island Formosa, who came
from thence to London above twenty years ago, and in
conversation told my friend, that in his country when
any young person happened to be put to death, the
executioner sold the carcass to persons of quality as
a prime dainty; and that in his time the body of a
plump girl of fifteen, who was crucified for an
attempt to poison the emperor, was sold to his
imperial majesty's prime minister of state, and other
great mandarins of the court, in joints from the
gibbet, at four hundred crowns."

This whole thread has sounded way to much like an
urban legend, abused version of "A Modest Proposal",
etc.. Yes people have under extreme conditions turned
to cannibalism such as the Donner Party in 1846 (the
largest case of cannibalismn U.S. history and the
text-book example of how NOT to run a waggon train
across the U.S. west). But I don't buy the mass
cannibalism for profit idea in modern China.

This noted, there are a lot of things that can be
clearly documented that are nasty/ugly regarding both
Microsoft / China that we can be stuck with rather
than this less than credible stuff.

Colin McGregor

> > I agree with John's assertion about xenophobes
> (and bigots in general)
> > and urban legends, there are enough examples of
> that throughout
> > history.
> > 
> > //mtmts> > 
> > [1] I know that the pun is slightly geographically
> incorrect.
> > 
> > --
> > "Playing safe is only playing."
> >          Fortune Cookie from Simon's Wok
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