Awesome!
I have a particular fascination with North Korea, a place I have never been to. (I visited South Korea for several months many years ago.) North Korea is such a global outlier in many ways that it may not have significance to anything modern. But the question it keeps challenging me with, is how does the country manage to spin information so that in effect everyone in North Korea goes along with its consensus? For that is the state of mind of the country: North Korea continues as is, because most North Koreans support it as is. For a great documentary exhibiting this consensus watch State of Mind.
Even better read this interview with the author of The Cleanest Race. Author Brian Myers was interviewed on NPR's The Marketplace of Ideas, and the transcript appeared on 3quarksdaily.
Q: Koreans, in this view, are the "child race" who are so pure-blooded and so virtuous that they have to be protected from the evil world that surrounds them, specifically by the likes of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Does that about get it?A: That is pretty much the ideology. As I say, it's something that a nine-year-old child in North Korea would have no difficulty understanding...
Even the North Koreans who escape from the country — and they are very small in number, those who choose to stay outside North Korea — still subscribe broadly to this racially-based way of looking at the world. They are still fans of Kim Il Sung, even if they think that Kim Jong Il is a bad man. It's extraordinary, really, that you don't have intellectual opposition to the regime in North Korea. We have very few refugees from North Korea who can be described as being political dissidents.
Q: Do the people of North Korea believe that the people of South Korea are essentially on an almost equal purity footing with them, and that they're just another branch of the child race but have unfortunately fallen victim to the Americans?
A: That's what they believe. Because the Korean people are racially, inherently good, it follows that the South Korean people are born just as good as the North Korean people are. But the North Korean propaganda apparatus makes a lot of the contaminating influence of the American presence in South Korea, the contaminating influence of American morals. The media in Pyongyang is also very critical of intermarriage between South Korean citizens and foreigners, especially between South Koreans and Americans. The North Koreans believe that South Koreans' racial purity is in danger.
Q: One of the interesting things about the state media in North Korea's view of the South is that they do not conceal the wealth of South Korea, which is just staggeringly greater than that of the North. It's revealed without the population hemorrhaging to the South. How is that?
A: It's because they have a very good way of spinning that wealth. The North Korean government says that the South Koreans are wealthy because Kim Jong Il's military-first policy has kept the Americans from launching another devastating war on the peninsula. That's one way in which they spin it, and they of course claim that the South Korean masses, for all their wealth, are deeply ashamed of living in a Yankee colony and want nothing more than to live under Kim Jong Il.
Q: There's a line in the book that very much intrigued me, where you say that some South Koreans feel a twinge of guilt that the North is somewhat morally superior, or made the morally superior choice. How widespread is that actual feeling?
A: South Koreans are also nationalists, and they have a sort of sneaking respect for this country to the north which has thumbed it nose at the rest of the world with impunity. My own South Korean students at the university where I teach, many of them are quite happy that North Korea is pursuing a nuclear program, because they believe that, should unification ever come, those nuclear weapons would then become the possession of the Republic of Korea and Seoul.
Q: You write in the book that the North Korean state is actually quite careful to not contradict an average North Korean's experience of their country. That's fascinating to me, because does that mean they can acknowledge any sort of way in which life in North Korea is bad, but can go back to, "Well, America's evil, and we're pure"?
A: They can acknowledge a lot more than a Marxist/Leninist state could acknowledge. They can acknowledge that South Korean people have a much higher standard of living. On the other hand, there are things they really can't acknowledge precisely because of their racialism. They cannot, for example, acknowledge the prevalence of crime in North Korea, because that is incompatible with the image of the Korean people as being uniquely pure. If your read North Korean newspapers, there is no mention at all of any kind of crime in North Korea. There are no real villains in North Korean popular culture either, because how could you have a North Korean villain? The kind of conflict you have in North Korean narratives is between a perfect character and a character who has perhaps some minor character flaws.
This is fascinating. Read it all.
If you want to succeed, you can’t wait for the world to give you attention the way a cripple waits for food stamps to arrive in the mail. You have to be a warrior. You have to attack with the madness of a mother whose child is surrounded by an army of predators.
Because, let’s face it, your ideas are your children. Their future is as tender and delicate as that of any newborn.
You can’t just write them down and expect them to succeed. Writing isn’t about putting words on the page, any more than being a parent is about the act of conception. It’s about breathing life into something and then working to make sure that life becomes something beautiful.
Report: One in Four Children Born With Ability To Slow Down Time
Posted on14 April 2010. Tags: General Gaming, Shooters
Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York — A shocking report was released today by medical researchers working at the Mount Sinai Medical Center’s Bullet-Time Research and Treatment Division, stating that as many as one in four children today are being born with the ability to temporarily slow down time.
“We didn’t expect these numbers,” said Dr. John Anderson, chief researcher of the phenomenon, concluding the five year study. “Frankly, no one did.”
While it has been generally accepted that the ability was becoming more widespread in recent years, particularly among gun-toting vigilantes, high-tech super-soldiers, and Old West renegades, the report still stunned the medical community and the public at large. Dr. Anderson explained the reason it has been difficult to present accurate data until now.
“The problem is, this ability to manipulate the time-stream has been called many, many different things in the past, and in the future as well. Bullet-Time, Matrix-Time, Heightened Reflexes, Adrenaline Rush, Focus Mode, Force Speed… the list goes on and on.”
Dr. Anderson proceeded to go on and on. “Exceeding Sense, The Speedbreaker, Warp Time, Double Haste, Impact Time… I think that’s most of them.”
“That’s precisely why it’s been so difficult to diagnose in both children and adults. But once we started looking at all of these abilities as the same syndrome, we realized it was far more widespread than we initially thought.”
The rise in the number of adults and children with the supernatural ability has caused a great deal of concern for friends and family of the afflicted. “I think everyone probably has a friend or a co-worker or a weird uncle who can slow down time,” said Mildred Payne, whose son was diagnosed with the ability in early adulthood. “But when it’s your own child, it’s a little disturbing. Don’t get me wrong. I love and support my son, and accept him as for who he is. It’s not a choice, he was just born that way. I know that. But it’s still hard not to worry.”
Possessing the ability to slow down time might not be a bad thing, Dr. Anderson was quick to point out. “Look at is this way. There have been mechanical devices specifically designed to give the bearer a similar ability, such as the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, or V.A.T.S., which indicates, in my mind, that being born with such a talent is a blessing, not a curse.”
“People afflicted with Bullet-Time can lead happy, fulfilling lives,” the doctor continued. “Maybe even happier than most. I mean, with Bullet-Time it’s much easier to pump round after round of white-hot lead into the heads of attacking mutants, clone soldiers, or enemy aliens with deadly accuracy. I could definitely see that coming in handy.”
Found this via Alex's shared Google Reader posts.
One of these things is not like the others...
Is it a Time Traveler? Read the article :)
