Meanwhile, North Korean officials engage in even more bizarre behavior. For example, food and fuel supplies sent to North Korea have been halted, not to force North Korea to stop missile tests or participate in peace talks, but to return the Chinese trains the aid was carried in on.
In the last few weeks, the North Koreans have just kept the trains, sending the Chinese crews back across the border. North Korea just ignores Chinese demands that the trains be returned, and insists that the trains are part of the aid program. It’s no secret that North Korean railroad stock is falling apart, after decades of poor maintenance and not much new equipment. Stealing Chinese trains is a typical loony-tune North Korean solution to the problem. If the North Koreans appear to make no sense, that’s because they don’t. Put simply, when their unworkable economic policies don’t work, the North Koreans just conjure up new, and equally unworkable, plans. The Chinese have tried to talk the North Koreans out of these pointless fantasies, and for their trouble they have their trains stolen. How do you negotiate under these conditions? No one knows.
How can they have forgotten so soon? Clearly, this is a job for Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter!
” what the North Koreans were waiting for was some treatment of their exalted leader with respect and a direct communication….I think he was quite ready. I didn’t have to argue with him. When I outlined the specific points that I had been informed in Washington was the administration’s position, I presented them to him. And with very little equivocation, he agreed…. I think it’s all roses now…. I’ve known that there were people in Washington who were skeptical about any direct dealing with the North Koreans. They were already condemned as outlaws. Kim Il-sung was already condemned as a criminal…. And it was kind of like a miracle and almost an incredible statement that Kim Il-sung gave me in response to my proposals, and it was hard to believe….”
Or, vitruvius, how about, following steved’s inane comment that ‘he is in charge of his own life and work place’, how about the notion of randomness (like his thoughts)?
What about the thug who takes over the life and work place of the local shopkeeper? So much for the shopkeeper being ‘in charge’.
In steved’s world, each molecule operates only by and for itself, with no hierarchical set of laws (such as those that enforce the combination of one atom with another atom). That’s called chaos. And that’s what happens without a state. Thug-rule or the effect of the biggest molecule bumping into smaller molecules.
Vitruvius
Okay then time changes nothing really. Let’s talk Conservatism. A very old ideology. It has within it a moderate brand(Edmond Burke) and an extreme brand founded by Joseph de Maistre. The former is evolutionary and the latter is counter-revolutionary. Both favour traditions but their traditions differ. Burke favours liberties and de Maistre traditional authority. You can’t take the authority out of the conservatism. So there is a philosophy of ruling elites within conservatism. Perhaps that is why they are so kind to the rich. The rich should rule because, well, they are more capable than us simple folk. Hmmm, elitism. You like that part of conservatism? It can’t be removed you know.
Et
Human organization is not only heirarchical it is also cooperative. Sports teams are great examples of cooperative ventures. Individually, each may be very skilled but it is only together that they are able to achieve greatness. In a heirarchy the guy at the top gets all the money and all the credit. Without a team behind him he would be nothing but another man with an idea.
Well, to be honest ET, I’d have to say that chaos happens. But let’s not get into Lorentz and Mandelbrot here. I do agree that the state is an important mechanism for organizing chaos, to a degree (and speaking as a minarchist: not that big a degree).
And, Steve, yes, time changes nothing. Transactions change things. Time is the mechanism by which nature measures the passage of transactions. Time is not, per se, causal. I would have thought that obvious, but then, I’ve been wrong before.
On the matter of “Let’s talk Conservatism”, I’ve got a better idea: let’s not. This thread is about NK, not your pet peeve. Although you might like to note that a “team”, in the sports sense, is a small-scale volitional collective. It is not communism (not that you said that).
Now, can we get back to North Korea? No, wait, I’ve never been there so I can’t go back, and even if I could I wouldn’t. But you know what I mean.
China doesn’t fear war or destruction, they can spare a few million people. What they fear is embarrassment. This story about them being duped and stolen from has much more potential to get them to put pressure on NK.
I think, Steve, that at the veneer level it’s something like that. But I don’t think any of us know what the heartwood is, for one thing, there are too many good competing theories. Indeed, there may be no heartwood, NK may be completely veneer. And yet, and yet, …
To paraphrase an old line:
We shoulda known we was in trouble when Jimmy Carter was on our side.
N. Korea: What, No Free Health Care?
by Mark Finkelstein
July 6, 2006
To those of us who see Cuba as nasty dictatorship whose people are mired in poverty thanks to the communism imposed by the Castro regime, little is more annoying than to hear the MSM tout the glories of the country’s ‘free health care,’ and low illiteracy and infant mortality rates. Beyond the dubiousness of the statistics cited, are the media suggesting that trading freedom for a bowl of government porridge is a good deal?
In any case, judging by this morning’s Today show, it looks as if the MSM have finally found a communist dictatorship they will not extol. The media seem to have drawn the line at, well, the DMZ line separating South from North Korea.
NBC reporter Tom Aspell [who I find resembles a younger Ian McKellen], narrated a segment which in turn reported on two documentaries that westerners have been permitted to film inside North Korea in recent years.
In narrating the images, Aspell offered this bleak commentary:
“Two million people in a failed state the size of Mississippi and most of them hungry because all available resources go to the military.”
“A bleak country where everybody is told to worship Kim Jong Il.”
“Misery for the majority and a pretty good living for a small elite around Kim Jong Il.”
“A leader presiding over a ruined country but one he hopes to keep isolated for as long as possible. Kim Jong Il’s missiles may be his downfall as the west moves toward more sanctions which may drive him from power.”
For me, the most striking image was the satellite photo displayed here of the Korean peninsula. The stark contrast between the bright lights of the south and the virtual blackness of the north is a perfect metaphor for the darkness and light of democracy versus dictatorship, communism vs. the free market.
All this and, blessedly, not a word about the North’s free health care!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1661149/posts
N. Korea: Taepodong-2 pointed at waters near Hawaii: report (direct provocation)
Posted by TigerLikesRooster
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