Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city... Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.
But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.
Applied Rationality focuses on public policy issues and tries to take a liberal perspective that is consistent (comments to the posts will often show otherwise) with neoclassical, rational-choice economics.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Hitchens on North Korea
Christopher Hitchens' abrasiveness is put to good use castigating North Korea (and Western leaders' kowtowing towards it).