Eshin Direct

Thieving Bastards?

Sometimes I don’t get people. Maybe they are as paranoid as me and always suspect the worst in human nature.

Gweilo Diaries is a site that offers a pundit’s eye view of the latest human rights violations and misdeeds of governments around the Asia region. The author, who I’ve sparred with on another site, extols the virtues of these basic human rights and the very idea of democracy puts faith and trust into the hands of the people to make the right decisions.

So how is that he posts up the results of Reader’s Digest survey, where it’s said that 4 out 5 Hong Kong people would return a wallet with money to the owner, and he states that the locals are lying? Not only that, but he calls them lying bastards in his usual condescending style.

I, for one, can attest to having my wallet returned to me when I lost it in Starbuck’s. Not only was it after their working hours, it was returned via the police station, which was some distance from the Starbuck’s that I lost it in. The local had obviously gone out of their way to ensure that my wallet was returned to me. With everything inside including $200. A couple of posters on his site have commented that they’ve had property infinitely more valuable than returned to them by locals.

Where exactly does the author of GD get off on judging everyone to his apparent high standards? His comments paint an incorrect picture of Hong Kong. I’d be more likely to write it off if I was in London. Hong Kong is a place of surprisingly law abiding citizens in comparisson to other places that I’ve been. You can walk down the street with relatively little trouble and public disturbances are almost unheard of. What the law doesn’t regulate, is regulated by other hidden factors.

Claiming an insight into the local mindset, he states that “found property is lucky”. Maybe it is true as I can’t claim to have such an insightful knowledge as he does but I doubt that this expression is true under these circumstances. I await correction on that matter.

As I have found with the author of Gweilo Diaries, the principles that he extols on his own site and on other sites, which are noble unto themselves, border on the hypocritical and insulting in his own attitudes. How can he have faith in a democratic system when he doesn’t have trust in a people he calls “lying bastards”?

But it is no surprise, since he claims that “I’m amazed at people who think they have the right to take the product of someone else’s labour and refuse to pay the owner for it.” as he commented to a post on FlyingChair about software piracy. As I’ve challenged him in another post, maybe he could supply the model releases for all the women he plasters up on his site?

Again, I feel the comments in his “lying bastards” posts are misrepresentative of Hong Kong and smacks of the holier-than-thou arrogant attitudes that continue to paint expats from Western countries in a bad light. As he congratulated me on posting what he felt was once the stupidest comment in blogging history, I, too, would like to congratulate him on the what I feel is the most ignorant post by an expat in the history of blogging.