Of Dullards and Dotards

“Rocket-Man versus The Dotard”:  it sounds like one of those wrestling events that The Donald used to impresario.   And it has elevated the fine old word dotard, which goes back as far as Chaucer,  into the flickering limelight of public attention.  To explain the word  were needless, as there is a nice summary here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/09/21/a-short-history-of-the-word-dotard-which-north-korea-called-trump/?hpid=hp_no-name_hp-in-the-news%3Apage%2Fin-the-news&utm_term=.d98bc93683c2

Note:  The word is sounded with a long "o":  DOTE-erd, almost rhyming with goat-herd.  Likewise the related word meaning 'senility', dotage.

But what younger readers may not realize (younger, that is, than four hundred years)  is that such spicy language on the public stage  is by no means an innovation.  For centuries, it has been the practice of controversialists   to belabor their opponents with colorful and inventive epithets.   Shakespeare’s plays well illustrate this.   Yet such slanging was not the province merely of playwrights and pamphleteers:  so sober a figure as Sir Thomas More, early sixteenth-century author and statesman (and ultimately martyr), and the subject of adulatory treatment in “A Man for All Seasons”,  whom no less than C. S. Lewis declared "a man before whom  the best of us must stand uncovered",  was a master of the genre.  His writings

… are by no means free from the scurrility which is characteristic of that age of controversy.  His opponents are “swine”, “hell-hounds that the devil hath in his kennel”, “apes that dance for the pleasure of Lucifer”, and so on.

-- The Cambridge History of English Literature, volume III: Renascence and Reformation (1908), p. 17.

Apes that dance, while Satan applauds!  If only Kim the Lesser had thought of that one!

As it is, this recent use of dotard  likely tumbled out of some old-fashioned Korean-English dictionary, rather than springing from the pen of any antiquarian Pyongyang polemicist.   Nonetheless, we applaud the momentary return to the scene, of this roguish old tatterdemalion vocable.

~

Despite the hoopla, dotard isn’t really so rara an avis as all that;  it should be familiar to anyone well-read.   Much more puzzling to American readers was the word wazzock, deployed back in 2012  against then-Presidential-candidate Mitt the Twit (to use another Britishism) after his lamentable junket to England.  You can read all about the word, and the episode, here:

     Word of the Day: “Wazzock”

And, for more on the variegated vocabulary of our present POTUS, this:

    Verb of the Day: “schlong”

 

[Update 29 October 2017]  French politicians have  of late  been coming up with choice epithets for their opponents.   It’s fun, plus it guarantees headlines.  The latest:  Today’s JDD reports that premier ministre Edouard Philippe has mocked Les Républicains (the current cover-name for the disgraced UMP) as branquignols.  That means they’re barmy.

As for the etymology, the word is likely a blend of branlant ‘unstable’ and croquignole ‘a mild insult’.

 

The Devil Wore Elevator-shoes

Update 23 December 2014]   It is pleasant to learn that some movie-goers at least, will have the (dubious) privilege of seeing “The Interview” this Christmas season.   It is a comedy (indeed, NPR described it as a “farce”, so don’t get your hopes up);  but if the Dwarf Dictator of that wretched statelet keeps going further, the script might be remade, not as comedy  but as documentary.

BTW -- We've been down this road before.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/wp/2014/06/25/north-korea-threatens-war-over-a-seth-rogan-movie/?tid=hpModule_ba0d4c2a-86a2-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394

According to the movie -- and to random stuff on the Internet so it must be true -- Kim Van Moron or whatever his name is, claims not to possess the organs of urination or defecation.  If true, this would (physio)logically imply that he is a dickless wonder who is full of sh*t.

 

In (dis)honor of that rogue state -- not so much the “Axis” as the “Anus of Evil” -- we here repost our earlier musings.

~ [Original post-date: 14 Dec 2013] ~

It is depressing even to have to think about North Korea, the geopolitical equivalent of anal warts.  But alas, it exists;  and like those annoyances, when extant, it must be attended to, lest the infection spread.

Today’s Los Angeles Times features a fascinating article about the remarkable developments of the last few days, in that wretched land.   Misled by the headline on the homepage of their website,

     North Korea's youth revolution stirs unease

I almost didn’t click on it,  since it sounded as though it might refer to some laughable lame pale-imitation of Gangnam style among adolescents wearing their hair around a quarter of an inch longer than the Party really prefers -- though even so attenuated a whiff of a Prague Spring would be welcome.   But no:  the term “revolution” is misused here, since the recent events do not involve any substantial segment of the North Korean population, young or otherwise, but are simply a palace coup, a bloody jostling among factions;  yet, given that country’s significant propensity for making mischief, and possession of the nukes to do so, Attention Must Be Paid.

As you are unlikely simply to stumble upon the article (since I read it this morning, the LATimes web team has  -- disgracefully -- demoted or 'defeatured' the article, removing it from the homepage entirely;  you will not find it unless you know it’s there), I here rescue it from oblivion (to the extent that appearing upon the prestigious World of Dr Justice blog  can be described as doing that) by quoting some of the juicier passages:

It is North Korea's version of a youth revolution, and it's making a lot of people nervous.

At 30, Kim Jong Un may well be the world's youngest head of state. His brother, Kim Jong Chul, two years older, is best known as an avid Eric Clapton fan but is also said to keep an eye on the leader's security. And the youngest of the Swiss-educated siblings, 26-year-old sister Kim Yo Jong, is seen frequently as an aide-de-camp to the leader.

With Thursday's execution of their uncle, Jang Song Taek, and the purge of his cronies, this impatient new generation of the Kim family dynasty appears to be kicking out the adults. More executions are expected.

"He had to get rid of the grumpy old men," said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea scholar based in Seoul. "He couldn't be a boss with subordinates who are twice his age, who don't understand him and don't take him seriously."

Arch-traitor and running-dog  Jang Song Taek confesses his guilt

Kim's tactics in some ways are reminiscent of China's Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Tse-tung in 1966, in which youthful Red Guards terrorized their teachers and other authority figures.

The 67-year-old Jang was for decades a trusted eminence grise, the interlocutor in an otherwise eccentric family.

Jang was appointed the de facto regent before Kim Jong Il died in December 2011, a job that included reining in youthful impulses — something the younger Kim clearly resented.

In a 2,700-word screed released Friday, Jang was accused of doing "serious harm to the youth movement in our country, being part of the group of renegades and traitors in the field of youth work bribed by enemies."

Just two years in power, Kim Jong Un has made a cult of youth the theme of his rule, investing the country's scarce resources in water slides, roller coasters and ski slopes.

The most notable foreign dignitary to visit Pyongyang, the capital, since he took over is the tattooed, body-pierced former NBA star Dennis Rodman, who is supposed to visit again next week.

Along with the charges of plotting a coup, the report by the official Korean Central News Agency detailed petty grievances that Kim clearly had been nursing for the last two years. Among them: When a monument was built to showcase a letter written by Kim to a unit of the People's Internal Security Forces, Jang directed that it be placed in a shady corner rather than in front of the building.

Jang also was accused of showing a lack of enthusiasm when Kim, while his father was leader, was promoted to vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. "He behaved so arrogantly and insolently, as unwillingly standing up from his seat and halfheartedly clapping," the report said.

Since his father died, Kim has fired five of the seven elderly statesmen who walked behind the car carrying the coffin in the funeral procession.

At least two other senior officials who reported to Jang have been executed: Ri Yong Ha and Jang Soo Kil. A defector group in Seoul reported that brother Kim Jong Chul personally held the pistol when the two were arrested because nobody else was brave enough to do it.

Although the story is likely to be apocryphal, it is indicative of the myth Kim is trying to create: he and his two siblings as heroic young warriors defending the Kim bloodline against interlopers.

More executions are anticipated as the purge continues. Unconfirmed reports from Seoul suggest that Kim might be going after another of his mentors: Ri Su Yong, who was appointed ambassador to Switzerland in 1988 and served as Kim's guardian while the boy was attending school in Bern.

In March, for no discernible reason, Pyongyang declared itself to be in a "state of war" with South Korea and threatened the United States with "thermonuclear war." The tantrums prompted a rare public chastisement from Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

A more pedestrian worry is who will be running things now. Jang oversaw most of North Korea's trade, maintaining the balance between various military-run companies that sell coal, iron ore and seafood in China and in turn import most of the country's consumer goods.

Beijing is likely to be in a difficult position diplomatically if Jang's underlings, many of whom work in China, attempt to defect to avoid being swept up in the purge.

"Kim Jong Un is young, but so were other heirs of the throne in the ancient kingdoms," Kim said. "Even if an heir is only 10 years old, one still has to uphold the leader.”

Which just goes to show, that one can be expensively educated in Swiss private schools, and still fail to develop into a human being.  (A troubling consideration for theorists of education.)

In view of all that, the case of North Korea must edge toward the world’s already crowded front-burner.   To commemorate the events, we here repost our essay from March.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     * 

~    { earlier post }     ~

In recognition of the recent, um, summit diplomacy, by the noted historian, statesman, gentleman and scholar Dr. Dennis Rodman, we here repost our earlier squib on arts & entertainment in North Korea.

His excellency the Undersecretary of State for East Asian Affairs

[Footnote:  Equally bizarre has been the (in Europe) headline-grabbing cavorting of the  temperamental actor tax exile Gérard Depardieu, with the torso-baring assassin and dictator Vladimir Putin in Russia.  As a satirist, I won't comment on this, since it comes pre-satirized.]

~    { original post }     ~

Freud … treats political society  not as an artifact  designed  out of fear and prudence  for the purpose of limiting universal egotism, but as the expression of man’s irrational longing for the return of authority. …

Lombroso … subsumed the psychology of the masses under a new science, “criminal anthropology”.

-- Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), pp. 222, 228

The NPR program “The State We’re In”  had a remarkable episode this weekend, consisting of an interview (in Korean, with translation) with a former “court poet” (not making this up) -- court poet (you heard that right) -- court effing POET  of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.  The segment was titled “I’m Outa Here” (referring to the minstrel’s eventual flight to China, and thence to the South Korean embassy), but it might just as well have been titled “The God-King with feet of clay wore elevator-shoes”, in reference to our jongleur’s rude disillusionment.

Anyhow, our KorCom rhymester churned out verse after verse in praise of the beloved Supreme Ruler -- and this, during a politically-induced famine in which millions were starving.  So appreciated were his prophetic profusions, that eventually the Great Dictator invited the lowly poet (unworthy to lick the muddy footsteps of the Great One) to a private session in the Royal (Dictatorial?) Palace.  Bowing in gratitude, the troubadour was ushered in to the Great One’s presence chamber.

Oddly, the flunky-poet repeatedly referred to Kim Jong Il as “God” (if we can trust the translator).  One had thought that the Communist North Koreans were mere atheists; turns out they are something much worse.  (Better to worship nothing at all, than to worship Satan’s minions on earth.)  

Great was the skald’s anticipation as he awaited --and waited, and waited, for hour after hour -- until the Sun-King might emerge -- like Sol himself -- resplendent in the East, shining forth his godlike face.

At last, the great double-doors opened….And out waddled a short, squat, cursing, farting  mini-monkey of a mannikin, Kim the Lesser -- turdlike offspring of the tyrant Kim Il Sung -- a rare witness to the occasional advisability of abortion.

The lowly scop waited to be noticed, but it was not to be.  The self-licking Leader’s fluttering fancy was instead caught by a giant wall-slogan eulogizing the God-King Kim Jong Il, and inquired what the writing was  made of.  “Animal skin,” he was informed.  (Whether from endangered species was not mentioned in the interview.)   This pleased him; he inquired whether all the many, many Kim-exalting slogans in the land were similarly confected.  No, he was informed, it’s too expensive, compared with gold leaf and whatnot.

Rising to the full extent of his tiny height, the simian God-King commanded that all those slogans should be taken down and replaced with slogans written in animal-fur.  And this, in the midst of a nationwide famine.

Non mais … c’est tout à fait typique…

At this point, our bard began to feel second thoughts stirring in his atrophied brain.  But ‘twas not that that finally broke the bonds of slavish adoration.  It was that he noticed that this homunculus was wearing steep elevator-shoes.

God, he thought, does not wear elevator-shoes.

~

It is owing to true stories such as that, that I formally withdrew from satire:  no-one can parodically top that.

Moreover, what is of interest here  are not the antics of the miniature monkey-king himself, like Mini-Me in Justin Powers.  For this was not a movie set, this was an entire nation.  A nation that has reveled in slavery for over half a century -- not writhing beneath the boot-heels of a foreign occupying power, but beneath the baseness of their own natures.   They brought this upon themselves, praising themselves lavishly for it the whole while, in the sort of robotic fulsome prose unique to North Korea.   And not one single person in the entire country, over all that time, has had the gumption to sink a pair of chopsticks into the eye-sockets of their puppet-master.  One can only conclude, as history has repeatedly shown:  The Broad Masses beloved of the Stalinoids, like Ur-horde of Freud’s nightmare imagination,  are natural slaves.

The radio program segue’d from segment to segment via interludes of those whiney, nasal, sing-song musicoidal noises that pass for music in the Orient.  This, doubtless with a view to cultural enrichment and sensitizing to Diversity.  But in context, it evoked only a shudder of disgust.

~

Gustav Le Bon (whose beard you may admire in the photo above) is an endless source of epigrams on the subject of servility:

"On domine plus facilement les peuples en excitant leurs passions qu’en s’occupant de leurs intérêts."

"On rencontre beaucoup d'hommes parlant de libertés, mais on en voit très peu dont la vie n'ait pas été principalement consacrée à se forger des chaînes."

Le Bon influenced Freud, who quotes him at length in Massenpsychologie.

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(Ich bin Sigmund Freud, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

In the West, during this period of autophagous capitalism and social decline, our recent trajectory is different.  In the ultimate Consumer Culture (divorced from all thought of Production), rather than masses of henodemonist starvelings, worshipping the Lider Máximo, we have clutches and niches of pampered fatties, worshipping themselves.  

In a technological mass society, Freud’s erotic leader requires a build-up.  The participating audiences at the modern theatricals of power  require more and more door prizes before they will the accept the enthusiasms constantly being manufactured for them.

-- Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), p. 238

Two different approaches to the Society of the Spectacle.

[Appendix] For a dramatization of the theme people-as-sheep, see "The Prisoner", episode 12: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMz9xqNgMM4

[Update 25 June 2014]  This just in!  A movie not to miss!!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/wp/2014/06/25/north-korea-threatens-war-over-a-seth-rogan-movie/?tid=hpModule_ba0d4c2a-86a2-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394

No Comment

Recently (we shall not say when or where exactly) a certain individual was put under severe -- indeed crippling -- career sanctions, in Venue X,

not for anything he (or she) said or did in Venue X,

but for something (s)he opined elsewhere.

In light of all which -- We have no comment;  and shall have none, going forward.  About that, or about anything else.

And thus the list of taboos, for which the First Amendment is suspended, grows by one.

Note:  It is strictly forbidden even to reveal which items are on that list.

Note further:   That fact that anything at all is taboo, is itself taboo.

STRENG  -  VERBOTEN.

Similar taboos occur in Western Europe:  although there, the list is different.

Since it is impossible for anyone to learn directly  what is on each of those lists (each individual item must be inferred from occasional news stories containing surprisingly virulent denunciations of someone who transgressed such a taboo, such as may occur when an item is relatively new to the list;  but these will be lacking for long-term item, for which no-one has ever dared say anything for years and years), the foreign traveler is under peril of his livelihood, and even (in Europe, as regards [redacted]) his liberty (you can literally be imprisoned there for expressing certain purely historiographic opinions, even in the most detached fashion), should he/she/it ever (which G*d forbid) give utterance to what, unbeknownst to him/her/it/self, it is forbidden to speak.

The latest State Department advice to Americans traveling abroad is:  Never -  Say - Anything.

Best advice to foreigners considering travel to the U.S. :   Go somewhere else instead.

Additionally, the Justice Department has ruled that foreign taboos have jurisdiction in the U.S. as well, and that anyone who knowingly or unknowingly violates one of them  may be subject to penalties.  Best advice:  Nobody ever say anything to anyone about anything at all.   If anyone were to speak to you, pretend to be deaf    hearing-impaired    differently auditorializable.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-comfort-women-20131219,0,2503100.story

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann,

darüber muß man schweigen.”

~

As for ourself, the roster of matters we dare even allude to, is shrinking.

The following topics are apparently still open to opinion;  and so, for the time being, we hereby renounce anything we have ever said about anything (in fact, we never did say anything, ever, about anything -- anything you might ever have read here, was posted by some mischief-maker who hacked into the system), and instead refer you to the following, still allowable topics -- although, as indicated, we have never actually said anything to anyone about these things, either, and are ready to renounce and denounce anything there stated should any item (say, hamsters) somehow fall under some new taboo:

=> bunnies  [not, obviously, of the Pl&yb*y variety]

=> hamsters [with no offense intended towards any other species of rodent or Creatures With Rodenticity who might feel left out]

=>  penguins  [This one is dicey, owing to the black/white angle; but for the nonce, the subject is apparently still permissible.  In future, however, we shall be careful to post nothing but photos of pink-and-blue penguins, or purple-and-orange penguins, and so on through all the wonderful colors of the all-powerful Rainbow.]

A totally typical penguin in its natural habitat

Really!  Honest Injun Native-American!  Lots of penguins look like this !!

[Update 11 - 11 - 2014:   Our stereotypical image above was in no manner of means intended to offend or demean or denigrate any spheniscids of an alternative coloration.  Read all about it here:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/389862/school-told-call-kids-purple-penguins-because-boys-and-girls-not-inclusive  ]

(We considered including elephants in this list, but finally concluded that these are too controversial, what with the ivory and all, and the Third World connections.  We shall endeavor to locate these posts and delete them as soon as time permits.)

Q:  What do you say to whites who might object that, to require celebration of “the Rainbow” and only the Rainbow, you are discriminating against whites, since white is not a color of the rainbow?

A:  Hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahaahahahaha.

Tell those crackers they can shove it.

DISCLAIMER:  NOTHING OPINED ABOVE SHOULD BE TAKEN AS IMPLYING ANYTHING BUT THE DEEPEST REVERENCE FOR THE SEVERE ACTIONS TAKEN BY THE INQUISITORS OF VENUE X, AGAINST THAT DESPICABLE UNPERSON WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS, HERE AND FOR ALL TIME THROUGHOUT HISTORY.

ALL HAIL THE WISDOM OF COMRADE STALIN !!!

 

  Big Sibling is watching you… and listening to you … and recording everything you say, or think, or dream

[Update 20 Dec 2013]  Our attorneys have advised us that our series of posts in praise of hamsters  could be regarded as discriminatory against the unfurry  furless   differently dermatologicalized.   Until the matter has been resolved in the courts, pending a decision as to whether any reference whatever to the creatures must be deleted,  posts will be permitted to remain  provided certain offensive language is replaced by something acceptable to the most thin-skinned  dermatologically minimized perennially aggrieved  understandably aggreviated pressure-group  grass-roots organization.

Approved samples:

Squee!  Hamsters are adorable. =>   Hamsters exist.

Hamsters are soo-oo-oo cute !  =>  Hamsters are not necessarily uncute.

I just lo-o-o-ove those little furballs! =>  We celebrate hamsters, equally along with such other fine species as warthogs, dung-beetles, gonococci, body lice, etc.

[Update 21 December 2013]  Legal counsel has reviewed the following post, and approved it for limited general consumption:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/10/bunny-break.html

Viewing of this material is restricted to those who are not offended by bunnies.

[Update 22 December 2013]

For a series of hard-hitting, hi-impact essays on the burning topics of our time,

yet written within the new guidelines of nooffensetoanyone,

try these on for size!

=> Straight talk from Dr J on foreign policy in the Sub-Sahara

=> Dr J talks to teens about love and marriage

=> A survey of Christianity and Islam

For further recently or unexpectedly taboo’d topics:

    Hour Wars (fusée horaire)

 

[Update 15 March 2014]  This morning’s Washington Post informs us of the following surprising fact:

Irish jokes still fair game

Politicians typically stay away from ethnic jokes, except if it’s Irish

The post goes on to illustrate with a video of politicians telling some.   That video won’t play on my machine, owing to various anti-malware protections;  and so to make up for it, we offer our own “edgy”, “taboo-testing”, but still (apparently) allowable joke:

An Irishman, a person of unrecorded nationality, and an individual from a nation we dare not name, walk into a bar  diner  organic restaurant

[For more on joke-taboos -- this time in France, try:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/01/stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-one.html ]

[Update 20 June 2014]  Weiteres zum Thema:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/06/20/george-will-to-c-span-on-sexual-assault-backlash-indignation-is-the-default-position-of-certain-people/?hpid=z2

[Update 10 Nov 2015]  Yet another reason, never to say anything about anything:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11986144/Teenager-bottled-by-ex-Countdown-champion-for-giving-his-book-bad-review.html

 [Update 19 Dec 2015]  Another topic that is highly charged, and festooned with taboos, in a certain country, but which can be rationally discussed here (except in certain Safe Spaces such as campuses):

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/19/world/asia/south-korea-comfort-women-park-yu-ha.html?_r=0

A well-balanced, un-nervous article.

Sky Wars

Tea-bagger types regularly deride the Obama administration’s (recently striking) foreign-policy achievements (Syria, Iran) by hooting that it’s all just to distract attention from “O-care”.   The danger, rather, is that press obsession with the latter will deflect attention from some potentially quite fraught developments around the world:  at present,  the quasi-confrontations in “Sino-Japanese” airspace, into which the U.S. Air Force has just now dared to tread.   For perspective -- imagine if China were to fly bombers (unannounced) over the water between New York and Martha’s Vinyard, blandly dismissing the provocation as a “routine exercise”.

If some drama of danger involves a passenger plane, Americans pay riveted attention;  but otherwise, if the aircraft are merely military, it perhaps strikes them as more like an airshow, with the romance of “Top Gun”:  War Games in the Sky.

This addlepated attitude is fine for moviegoers, but not for free men.    What do we do when China shoots down one of our planes?   As we inquired in the case of our proposed attack upon Syria (advocated by John McCain and his ilk, and successfully deflected by the President):  after the bugle-blaring curtain-opening, flags waving, what is the plan for the middle distance? [See Intervention in Syria: Cui Prodest?]  As we saw in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the Bush administration didn’t really have one.    But make no mistake about it:  the military and economic heft of China are in a whole different league from those of Afghanistan or Iraq.   Yet more, we never did go to war against those nations as a whole -- initially it was just supposed to be against the Taleban and the Sadaam Baathists;  later we got sucked in (surprised?),  but even after the quick victory over the announced targets of the invasion  and the rising of a much broader enemy caused by the invasions themselves,  we still were backed by significant segments of the local populations.   In a war against China, that would by no means be the case.

You might think it alarmist, even to use the phrase “War with China” in a sentence.  But we are now rattling sabres.   If you’re not prepared to use your sabre, why rattle it?

[Note:  I won’t comment about the merits of the Chinese move, having nothing of value to add.   But here is a seemingly even-handed summary: ]

This face-off marks the most worrying strategic escalation between the two countries since 1996, when China’s then president, Jiang Zemin, ordered a number of exclusion zones for missile tests in the Taiwan Strait, leading America to send two aircraft-carriers there.

Plenty of countries establish zones in which they require aircraft to identify themselves, but they tend not to be over other countries’ territory.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21590930-chinas-new-air-defence-zone-suggests-worrying-new-approach-region-face

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

~

There is another dimension to all this, quite apart from the game-theoretic calculations of diplomacy (a game of General Tso’s “Chicken”, you might say).  Consider this article from the morning’s press:

Japanese protesters have demanded that ethnic Koreans “go home or die,” disrupting the once-bustling neighborhood.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/new-enmity-between-japan-and-korea-plays-out-in-tokyos-koreatown/2013/11/28/974c91cc-528b-11e3-9ee6-2580086d8254_story.html?hpid=z1

This reminds us that the East Asian cauldron contains more antipathies than just a bilateral face-off between China and Japan.  Do we really want to stir that particular pot?

And not only Koreans are in the rifle-sights of an increasingly noisy fringe in our … ally … Japan.   Here, an animated crowd of Japanese welcome some Western visitors outside their hotel:

“White Pigs Go Home”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4Veih24Dsg&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dr4Veih24Dsg&app=desktop

Imagine what things will be like if we get more deeply involved in their mess.

 

Add to these, Taiwanese sensibilities, and you have sixteen reasons (two-to-thefourth bilateral antagonisms) for us to stay out.

~

The whole region is a prickly thicket of mutual antipathies.   And he who toucheth pitch …   Indeed, already we have, in letting-in their populations, let in some of their meshugaas.  A reader of the WaPo article commented:

In the US in many school systems with Korean populations the Koreans have agitated for and gotten the school to change their geography maps. The Sea of Japan is now the Eastern Sea.

2 lessons to be learned here:
1) Americans of Korean decent have learned their community organizing liberal fascism well.
2) Our schools are more interested in politics, grievances and sensitivities than education.

[Update Sunday, 1 December 2013]  After months of taking the public pulse by wading through American readers’ comments, which, whatever the initial subject, generally devolve into Obamaphobic rants, it is almost refreshing to get a glimpse of the wedge-brained craziness that prevails in other arenas.  In a comment on this week’s Time blog on the subject of the Japan-China island dispute, one reader vents:

    The Diaoyu Islands are belong to China

You go, guy!   “R U basis is bewrong 2 Us !!!”

Actually, that post interestingly reveals, two of the wretched outcroppings actually bewrong, de facto, to US:

The eight barren isles — two of which are under control of the U.S. military — are called the Senkaku Islands (in Japan) and the Diaoyu Islands (in China). … Japanese citizens cannot land on either of the islands without first getting permission from the U.S. military

--  http://swampland.time.com/2013/11/25/meanwhile-3500-miles-from-iran/#ixzz2mEigS6Ds

Incidentally, that blogger as well is worried that this shadow-play of feints and parries, might spin out of control, for he headlines his post

China’s Restriction on Airspace Over Disputed Islets Could Lead to War

Weekend declaration by China ratchets up chances of conflict with Japan and the U.S.

If that were to happen, it could make the Korean War and the Vietnam War seem like a stroll by the carp-pond, a walk in the park.

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The  U.S. intervention in this dispute, while morally and geopolitically understandable, smacks of brinksmanship:  Are we in fact willing to go over the brink?

The Sea of Japan is no stranger to provocative airborne incidents, fraught with peril for all concerned: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007

At the time, there was considerable speculation in some quarters that the passenger plane that was shot down  may actually have been a ferret flight. (W-Allahu a`lamu…)

China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea, all facing off and snarling at each other.

And then, as though advancing a pawn, we place some of our own assets in harm’s way.   The analogies with Sarajevo are obvious.

Destiny -- your move.


(By the by, there is also North Korea, lurking in the wings.  So far they haven’t figured in this scenario, but their usual role is to act unexpectedly and Make Things Worse.)

~

It is actually reassuring that the Administration announced a  geostrategic “pivot to Asia”.  This means that the situation there has their full attention, and they are not just winging it, despite that gadfly distractions that daily buzz up from the Republicans, and the media’s obsession with mayflies.

And indeed, Obama recently pulled off a neat bit of brinksmanship in the Middle East, threatening the Syrian regime if it did not give up its chemical weapons.   Calling the bluff, al-Assad didn’t blink; but then the President turned around and called Congress’s bluff concerning the Right To Declare war, whereupon those playpen blowhards slunk off with their tails between their legs, and the adults got down to business, so far with stunning results.

~

This morning, as my wife set off for the gym, to abye her sins by trudging  for an hour on a treadmill in front of a TV screen (this would be reckoned cruel and unusual, had a court  ordered it), I requested that she check out Fox and CNN, to see how they were handling this story.

She reported back:   Neither had touched on it  during the hour she watched.  They spent the whole time covering a local train derailment.

So we turned to the foreign press.

France having had no colonial history with any of the four principle countries in this standoff,  we may look to commentary from that source  for a comparatively dispassionate summary of the basics of the case;  France knows that it is here just an onlooker.   Here is some that is well-phrased:

Chine-Japon : jeux dangereux en mer de Chine

Depuis plus de 40 ans, Japon et Chine se disputent un petit archipel inhabité en mer de Chine. Mais jamais la crise n'avait connu une telle escalade.

"Nouvelle incursion de bateaux chinois dans les eaux territoriales des Senkaku" : il ne se passe pas une semaine sans que ce titre ne barre la une des journaux nippons. Priés par les garde-côtes du Japon de quitter les parages de ces îles de mer de Chine orientale, les navires gouvernementaux chinois n'obtempèrent pas. "On n'a pas de raison de partir, on est chez nous", répondent-ils en substance.

La querelle ne date en effet pas d'hier, mais elle s'est intensifiée depuis le rachat en septembre 2012 par l'État nippon de trois des cinq principaux îlots Senkaku à leur propriétaire privé japonais. Cette nationalisation de fait a mis en rogne Pékin qui depuis multiplie comme jamais les actions provocatrices à l'égard de Tokyo.

La bataille autour des Senkaku est actuellement le point noir des relations sino-nippones, mais c'est surtout le symbole d'un conflit historique entre les deux nations qui se disputent la suprématie en Asie.

-- http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/chine-japon-jeux-dangereux-en-mer-de-chine-29-11-2013-1763289_24.php

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