As they say, self-consciousness is a man's greatest enemy.
I am talking about the "controversy" surrounding a quote I applied in my second report, published in the final week of last election, on January 17, 2006. The quote was "All reactionaries are paper tigers".
I say "controversy", quote unquote, because nobody told me exactly what the controversy was with that quote. I had to figure it out myself. Initially, I thought the problem was that "reactionaries" and "paper tigers" are derogatory. Admittedly, it was atypical of me to use such terms in public and apply them to Paul Martin and George W. Bush. However, I felt very natural to do that at the time, given the long list of names I myself had been called (just see the list a couple of paragraphs down below in the introduction) and Martin Liberals' apparent strategy to turn the election campaign into a nasty spitting match over my file.
That's why I tried to play it down a little bit with a sense of humor on my January 24 blog.
Another possible controversy resulted from the realization that nuclear bombs were specifically referred to as paper tigers one time. I realized this about a month after I published my second report, through an article written by a well-known Chinese dissident on a website I frequented. This dissident was of an older generation. Perhaps for people grown up in China in the 1950's or 1960's, it was common knowledge that nuclear bombs were referred to as paper tigers. But when I grew up, I rarely heard that kind of expression.
To me, the meaning of the quote is fairly straightforward. If you are wrong, you will lose no matter how powerful you appear to be. I believe when most people use it, that is what they mean. As far as my writing is concerned, I think the quote fits quite appropriately between the paragraphs. -- Given the way the election was going at the time, I could sense that Martin Liberals were going to lose.
Besides, the quote was one of my pet phrases. (If you have followed my story, you would know why I used the word mantra instead of "pet phrase". I learned it from Pat MacAdam.) I used to say it a lot during my trading days.
When I was trading on my own in 2000, sometimes I felt that the Defendant not only monitored my trading activities, but they also went against me in the same market with their substantially stronger financial resources. – I already wrote in my reports why I thought that my trading activities were monitored. Frankly, I am less certain that the Defendant actually used their money to sabotage my trading because it was just too crazy. That's the reason I did not write about it in my report.
However, it was actually quite easy for the Defendant to do because, due to my limited financial resources, most of my trading was done in the "mini" stock-index markets and I generally took a position for a very short period of time, usually measured in minutes. So if someone had lots of money and could see my trading activities in real time, he could conceivably take a big opposite position in this small market right after me and try to lead the market temporarily to the other direction in an effort to shake me off.
Until I was robbed on or around October 20, 2000, my normal trading only lasted a few months. However, by monitoring related regular contract markets as well as the underlying indices, I did feel somebody was going against me. The price discrepancy between the regular and "mini" markets was easy to see – however brief it might be.
When this happened, the critical thing for me to do was to maintain my confidence in the markets. So I just kept saying to myself: "All reactionaries are paper tigers." (In Chinese)
I hope I have dealt with all possible controversies resulted from this quote.
Update the day after: In English, the thought of the quote came to my mind through Dick Morris’ book The New Prince. “Paper tigers” is in the title of one of the chapters.
Update the day after the day after:
I picked up a copy of The New Prince during a huge book sale, thinking that the Machiavelli stuff might help me become more “mature”.
Instead, I found myself right at home with the politics of positivity that the author preached.
Haven’t bought any other politics book since.
