Okay, I'm officially sick of China

At the risk of enraging 1.4 billion (often sensitive and/or litigious) people, I'd like to say that after 4 months or whatever of the Olympics, I am totally over China. We are constantly told that China feels misunderstood by the West and that we just need to understand them better. Perhaps that is true for some people, but I think I understand China fairly well: it's a big totalitarian dictatorship that has decided it can do capitalism better than everybody else without the need for any messy democracy. And guess what? They are proving to be right.

Why bother with environmental regulations when it's so much cheaper to just fuck up the world? Why bother with unions and workers' rights when you can just exploit your people and create justifications to dismantle those institutions in the West?

China and Russia are proving that capitalism doesn't need democracy and that's a terrible, terrible thing for those of us who grew up in free societies.

As for the Olympics, I haven't caught the fever. A lot of gay people and women I know are totally into it (for obvious reasons) , but it seems to just bring out the worst in everybody. China plays a shell game with its gymnasts' ages. Georgia provokes Russia. Russia invades and stays. Michael Phelps is a celebrity. It sucks.

And can we please have a moratorium on journalists getting sent over there on their companies' dime writing "China is the Future" pieces? Yeah, it's big and there are lots of people and and cool buildings and great dim sum, but you know what? It ain't my future, and your column could be produced a lot cheaper in Beijing.