Help an Idiot

19 June, 2009




As you may have noticed, I don't get much work done in the ol' idiots' collective workshop these days. It's not that I've ceased to be the idiot you've come to know and trust, but rather that I just have too damn much other reading and writing to do, leaving me with little time to sit around making advertisements for this site.

And, as it happens, I'm only posting now because I need some help. I'm working on a short research paper right now - to be submitted sometime in the next ten days or so - about House Resolution 4011, which was originally passed in 2004 by the United States Congress and renewed in 2008. For those of you not hip to the legislative lingo, this bill was better known as the North Korean Human Rights Act and was designed, as Wikipedia will tell you, to make it easier for the United States to help North Korean refugees, including by granting them asylum in the United States.

Sounds like a perfectly noble piece of legislation, right? But why do it? After all, China has long been opposed to encouraging defection from North Korea (see video above), and South Korea - the constitution of which grants citizenship to any North Korean reaching its shores - has until recently been loath to criticize North Korea's human rights record or to encourage defection by North Koreans. Indeed, the then-ruling Uri Party, as well as numerous other liberal groups, were quick to criticize the bill, claiming that it would do more to harm relations between the two Koreas than it would actually help refugees.

This very issue has been on people's minds this week as South Korean president Lee Myung-bak traveled to Washington to meet with President Obama, a meeting which many hoped would include discussions of the human rights issue. Paul Wolfowitz, writing this week in the Wall Street Journal, gives this description of the South Korean and Chinese position:

Both China and South Korea are afraid of revolutionary change in North Korea, even though both would welcome a "modernizing" evolution. They recall the flow of refugees from East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German government and worry about a repeat of these events in North Korea. But the German refugee flow was a consequence of the weakening grip of the communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. It was not the cause of that weakness. A more relevant example for the North Korean case is Vietnam, where the departure of refugees did nothing to weaken the regime and may even have stabilized it.



Reluctance to antagonize North Korea has been another reason for inaction. Under President Lee's predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, this tendency was so extreme that in 2007 South Korea abstained from a United Nations vote condemning North Korean human-rights violations. President Lee's administration has reversed that embarrassing policy, but South Korean officials remain concerned about North Korea's reactions to even the mildest criticisms. Unfortunately, many U.S. government officials seem equally reluctant to do anything that might jeopardize negotiations with North Korea.


Wolfowitz goes on to point out that, since the passing of the North Korean Human Rights Act, the United States has only accepted 81 refugees from North Korea, even as South Korea has accepted 2,809 since Lee Myung-bak took office sixteen months ago.

My question, then, is why would the U.S. Congress actively antagonize the South Koreans and Chinese - whose help is sorely needed in resolving the North Korean nuclear issue - if the U.S. government is either unwilling or unable to take the lead in a substantial refugee resettlement program as it did with Indochinese refugees in the late 1970s and early 1980s? Additionally, I remain unclear as to why this act was necessary given the pre-existence of the 1980 Refugee Act, under which, I believe, six North Koreans were admitted to the U.S. in 2006.

There is additionally, a security concern in all of this. As Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland note here (p. 47), some fear that North Korea may try to infiltrate spies into the United States via the refugee line, which is another reason that it is difficult for North Koreans (as well as Palestinians and Libyans) to receive refugee asylum in the United States.

I'm especially curious about the institutional momentum behind and reaction to this bill. Senator Sam Brownback and Representative Jim Leach were both active in the bill's passage, but I'd like to get a better understanding of how the bill was perceived in, say, the State Department (particularly by those negotiators, such as Christopher Hill, who were working on the Six Party Talks). What were the involved parties hoping to accomplish with this bill and how, if at all, has it factored into subsequent affairs on the Korean peninsula?

As far as I can tell, there hasn't been much written on this particular matter and I'd thus appreciate it if those of you with knowledge, opinions, or wild guesses would leave any ideas or links in the comments section.

Thanks.


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More Proxy Posting

29 May, 2009

Being short on time these days (as if you hadn't noticed), I've sunk to allowing others to do my posting for me. Fortunately, those others happen to be, as in my previous post, PJ O'Rourke and, in this case, George Will.

The following is Will's talk at the presentation of the 2006 Friedman Prize (named in honor of Milton), given every two years by the Cato Institute.


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Return, With PJ

22 May, 2009

I know, I know: this post spells the end of the longest hiatus in the otherwise storied history of this particular outpost. And I promise I'll be better at this posting thing from here on out. Wait, no, I don't promise any such thing, but I will try.

For now, though, PJ O'Rourke - one of my personal heroes - seems to be as a good a way to return to posting as any. Here he is recently at the Australian National Press Club:


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The Defense of the Indefensible

25 February, 2009




Bloggingheads posted a fascinating conversation (see video above) over the weekend between Mark Leon Goldberg of UN Dispatch and Kevin Jon Heller of Opinio Juris. Heller, an American law professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, is currently involved as an advisor to the defense of Radovan Karadžić, the accused Bosnian Serb war criminal, in Karadžić's trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. For those of you not old enough to remember the 1990s, Karadžić is allegedly the man behind the massacre at Srebrenica in 2005, in which 7,500 men and boys from the area were killed.

Not surprisingly, Heller has come in for some criticism for his decision to be involved in any way whatsoever with the defense of a man like Karadžić (who, like Slobodan Milošević, is representing himself). Heller, however, answers his critics by saying that part of what defines liberal, democratic cultures is the belief that even an accused monster deserves a fair trial. As brutal and despised as Saddam Hussein was, his trial and subsequent execution at the hands of a jeering lynch mob did not sit well with people around the world who value a judicial system based on law rather than revenge. Having said this, though, Heller, citing his Jewish heritage as a conflict of interest, goes on to say that he would not have represented Adolph Hitler had the Führer not offed himself in the waning days of World War II.

And how, you're no doubt wondering, does any of this relate to Korea?

Let's say North Korean leader Kim Jong-il somehow finds himself in a jail cell at the International Criminal Court in The Hague later this year. And imagine that you're a criminal defense attorney. Would you represent him?

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Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Trifles

22 February, 2009

Perhaps the greatest evidence of the economic prosperity enjoyed in Korea is the ability of the country's citizens to pursue the most puzzling and seemingly pointless pursuits. As evidence, I offer the case of Kim Sun-Ok, a South Korean housewife who recently broke the world record for marathon singing by belting out tunes for more than 76 hours straight at a local karaoke bar. Via Perth Now and the AFP:

She started singing at 11.14am local time on Thursday and sang a total of 1,283 tunes before she gave up at 3.21pm on Saturday following her family's appeal for her to quit for the sake of her health, it said.


Under Guinness World Record regulations, she was given 30-second breaks between songs and five-minute breaks every hour. She was also barred from singing any song she had already sung less than four hours earlier.

I emphasize that Ms. Kim is a homemaker in a country where women traditionally performed the great bulk of housework - cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and everything in between and on the edges. In the past, if a woman worked before marriage, she would typically quit that job after the nuptuals and stay at home to raise the kids and keep the homefront in order, a full-time job and then some that had her working long hours.

Slowly, though, as the world and then Korea became more prosperous, the formerly backbreaking routine of a housewife (doing laundry by hand, for instance) gave way to an "outsourced" life: the laundry to a machine, for example, or the food prep to restaurants and department stores. Add to this a declining birthrate that has also returned a fair chunk of time to your average ajumma's day and what Korean cities are left with is roving packs of bored, middle-aged women, always on the prowl for some way to fill their time.

All of which has given Korea's housewives the time and energy to head down to the noraebang and act the diva for 76 hours without stopping. Show me the Korean housewife of 30 years ago who had the time for such shenanigans.


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Networked Minutiae

20 February, 2009


I was born in 1979, which puts me in the final generation to remember what life was like before the internet and cell phones and the other assorted technology that has made our lives so much easier and more interesting. Hell, our family even owned a black-and-white television. As a result, I often feel that I appreciate the wonders of our modern world more than, say, folks who were born after about 1985 and who thus never had to learn how to use a library card catalogue or miss a phone call because the only phone they had was mounted on the wall in their kitchen.

The flipside of having a toe-tip in ancient times, however, is that I am simply unable to see the attraction in many of the latest applications of all this new technology. As this site attests, I appreciate the impact - both potential and realized - of blogs, and photo sites like Flickr are truly a marvel. But I have yet to see a good explanation for the popularity of Twitter, and while in theory I see the attraction of Facebook, I find that I can't read the status updates of more than two friends without wanting to yell, "who the hell cares how many songs you just loaded onto your iPod or what color of socks you're wearing?"

If these social networking sites allow us to be more connected than ever before, they also remind me of why, in the past, I resisted being more connected than I already was: online, just as much as offline, the minutiae of other people's lives is boring and I take offense when they imply, via their Facebook status updates, that I might be interested. My life may not be a thrillride but it's not so bad that I have to care about what you're drinking right now.

These sites do, however, show just how slick a lot of people are at marketing, particularly at marketing themselves. With a site like Facebook, a person can portray himself exactly as he wishes to be seen: no dandruff, no dirty dishes in the sink, no smut under the mattress, no penis stuck in the bathtub drain again. One thing’s for sure, though: Facebook doesn’t make a loser any less pathetic, as evidenced by all the invitations I initially got from the same people to join “Siamese Zombie” groups.

What’s most amazing to me is that a concept as simple as Facebook could be so goddamned successful, or that they could actually charge money for some of things on offer, such as JPG images of a jalapeno pepper for $1 that you can then give to your friend (this - not surprisingly - seems to have disappeared). I’m forever surprised at what people will pay for, and even more at the fact that I couldn’t have thought of charging them for it before someone else did.


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Back to Basics

19 February, 2009

Today's issue of the IHT has a fascinating article by Su-hyun Lee on the adjustment of North Korean defectors to life in South Korea. After years of peddling their "North Korea as Communist Shangri-la" myth, the regime conceded some time ago that, yes, South Koreans have the better standard of living of the two countries, a level of prosperity they have attained by selling their souls to imperialistic occupiers from the United States. A lot of defectors, then, arrive in South Korea expecting that their lives will be a featherbed of delights, only to be sorely disappointed:
After she defected here from North Korea in 2006, Ahn Mi Ock was shocked to learn that most South Koreans lived in small apartments and had to struggle to buy one.

Ahn, 44, had fully expected that once in the South she would enjoy the same luxurious lifestyle portrayed in the television dramas she had watched on smuggled DVDs. It had not occurred to her that the fashionably dressed characters sipping Champagne in the gardens of stylishly furnished houses were not, well, average South Koreans.
For my part, I've long been fascinated by the exposure of North Korean defectors to the outside world and to a semblance of reality. Due to the regime's near-monopoly on information in North Korea, many citizens have never heard of, much less used, basic ideas and technologies that we take for granted every day. When they arrive in South Korea, defectors generally spend three months in a government-run "reeducation" center - ideological detox, if you will - in an attempt to gain a basic understanding of how a market functions and how to conduct one's daily life in such a system. Three months, though, is scarcely time enough to learn the things that the rest of us have absorbed for our entire lives. To that end, other programs have been established:
To alleviate their confusion, a Newspaper in Education program to encourage young people to read was introduced a year ago at Setnet High School, an alternative school for North Korean defectors. There, they can ask an instructor to explain concepts they encounter in newspaper pages.

"What is business and sales?" asked Park Jeong Hyang, 18, during a Setnet class.

"Amateur? Is that something to do with sports?" asked Mah Gwang Hyuck, 23.

"Can you explain what marketing is again?" asked Kim Su Ryun, 18.
Where to begin?

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Guys in the Sky

10 February, 2009


Foreigners, with good reason, are usually surprised and perplexed to learn that Korea has a Ministry of Gender Equality. Not that the relations between the sexes in Korea couldn't stand to improve, but I, for one, am skeptical that simply creating another layer of government bureaucracy will have any appreciable impact on the matter. Of course, as the Korean economy is liberalized and becomes more globally competitive, the opportunities for women will expand accordingly - as they have over the past thirty or forty years. Officials over at the Ministry of Gender Equality, however, will no doubt be quick to take credit for these gains in the status of women, but what we'll really have is a problem of simultaneity: opportunity increased and Korea has a ministry that ostensibly promotes such advances, but correlation does not indicate causation.

My reason for bringing this up?

The JoongAng Daily yesterday ran a lengthy feature piece on the relative scarcity of male flight attendants on Korean airlines. Despite having won numerous industry awards for excellence, Asiana and Korean Air continue to come under fire for discriminating against men:

Korean Air has 463 male flight attendants, which is about 11 percent of its total flight attendant contingent.

The ratio is 34 percent for Air France, according to [The National Human Rights Commission], and 6 percent for Asiana Airlines, according to Asiana management.

To which I can only ask: so what? These airlines continue to win plaudits for their customer service so we can assume that they're doing something right. Perhaps the management at these companies knows something that the human rights watchdog and the Ministry of Gender Equality don't, namely that customers, for one reason or another, prefer female flight attendants and are willing to patronize carriers that provide them. That may - or may not - be sexist on the part of the passengers, but meeting that preference is wholly rational on the part of the airlines. Quite frequently, companies are merely reflecting their customers' preferences when they adopt employment policies unrelated to technical productivity.

The JoongAng article does, however, point out that male flight attendants can at times be preferable to their female counterparts:

...there are times when a male presence is called for. Kim, who still flies about 10 hours a month, says there are still a few old-school (if not chauvinistic) passengers who demand male flight attendants, saying that they will talk only talk to another man.

Kim also mentioned an incident when a sick passenger defecated in his pants and Kim helped him get cleaned up.

“If I were a woman, I think the man would’ve been extremely humiliated,” Kim said.

(Yes, I'm sure that having a man there to clean him up meant that the incontinent old bugger could see the full humor in his situation.)

Finally, it bears noting that this particular instance of gender discrimination takes place in a highly-regulated and protected airline industry (although it is becoming less so), where for many years entry by foreign firms has been subject to all manner of local barriers. Coincidence? Maybe.


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