One of the most annoying things about Chinese New Year is walking. I’m a lazy bastard yet I have to walk all the way to a bus stop to go to the Convention Center to take a bus to the border to walk to take another bus into the underbelly of Communism (it’s called China, you idiots). I’m back on Tuesday and I’ll be bringing enough money to relieve the debt in the US and I’ll be shopping for a new bank account, but then again the journey to do that is terrible. Or rather, hurts my legs.

And to make things worse, the metaphorical crack I am on, Twitter, is banned. As well as Facebook. You know, they might as well ban Flickr but seeing as they did that once they probably will as soon as I set foot on communistical soil. Hopefully Tumblr isn’t blocked because Tumblr has a very bare-bones Twitter client I can try to use.

I’ve also got my PSP with me, which is not as awesome as it sounds because in retrospect I should have bought an 8GB Memory Stick because I am unable to put both my Billy Joel music and GTA Vice City Stories on there without it telling me the card is full. Hooray. I can’t exactly grab a new stick on the go, so I’ll have to make do and whatever.

Wired Magazine has an excellent article about the wonders (or lack thereof) of those Internet rehab centers in China, and to me they sound like Guantanamo Bay, but worse. They beat you up more than a BDSM junkie would in his lifetime.

Worst part? People are overreactive over their kids and their “addiction”, because most of the time they’re just letting off steam, not exactly playing 24 hours straight and feeling suicidal when they aren’t playing. They’re only normal.

Recently, Deng Fei came to a conclusion: His son was never addicted. “He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink. The Internet was probably his way to vent the pressure on him,” he says, staring at his feet. “We didn’t know that then. But we know that now. It wasn’t really an addiction. It was his way out of the pressure of being a student.” Zhou Juan raises her head. “He didn’t even play that much,” she says.

Too late to come to that conclusion, wasn’t it?

Just last week, the Beijing city government banned knives for sale, among a list of things that were not for sale during the National Day parade. Just like that. No fuss, just some Communists listing a bunch of stuff their peons could and couldn’t do. None of those passing laws and things, and even if there were, it wouldn’t be voted on by the mass majority.

And the full name of the PRC is the People’s Republic of China.

While I may not agree on the idiocy of Chinese law and bureaucracy, and ordering conversations on the Beijing metro is more 1984 than Brave New World, I couldn’t help but wonder if this is how the world should work.

No, not like conversations tapped! But if democracy was scrapped… as we know it, anyway. Think about it. Just a bunch of guys and girls in a Congress-sized room, and some big supreme leader (think President, without the suit) and they just pass stuff. None of the stupidity that goes with passing laws, no fat women arguing no to healthcare, and no campaigning at all. We don’t care about politics, anyway.

That’s right, we don’t. More Americans vote on American Idol than they do on the President, and when they DO care, their opinions are mostly slanted toward which pundit is on TV when they’re flipping the channels back and forth. AC360? Or what about tuning into some Glenn Beck? Ooh, how about the baboon, Bill O’Reilly?

This completely removes all that, and more. It wouldn’t be like the Soviet “democracy”, where the tiny little regions of the USSR would spend the whole day rubber stamping laws from Moscow in their own Communist Party hall, or where the Chinese would like to strip away any more dignity than you currently have on the subways, all in the name of a “harmonious society.” This new type of… socialism, democracy, anarchy, whatever you want to call it, doesn’t need a name. It just needs a basic set of principles. Just a room of people voting on stuff we don’t care about, and leaving politics out of the common society. Basically what the US is in right now, only you don’t have to vote anyway, or argue about laws being passed, just watching TV and finding out that they decided to ban smoking. For good.

If only what China does is put into good use, it could work. You just need to have some faith in the average politician… you know, the righteous kind. Then you just follow it.

Sounds a little bit like dystopia, on you’re not in a grey tinted city and you aren’t arrested for thinking stuff? You may be close than you think anyway. And besides, what could go wrong? People who vote for mayors, senators, congressmen, Presidents, whatever always feel disappointed that they were suckered into voting for a guy who lies to you or another guy who lies to you. This takes all the guilt out of the voting circle, and who knows? This might actually weed about the dumbasses that are determined to stop cops from chasing suspects anywhere. We might actually get something done. All governments should do this. Instead of giving an illusion that the government cares, they should just flat out admit they didn’t care in the first place.

That wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it? Would you sacrifice a bit of a democracy you couldn’t care less about (you’re busy making money and hoping the TSA won’t anal frisk you, right?) if it meant things would happen at a faster pace, you know, without waiting for anywhere between five days and five decades?

I sure would. But I don’t want to see an exact carbon copy of how China does it.