Venezuela and North Korea have kept diplomatic relations since 1974, when the Venezuelan government recognised it as a sovereign state, following the release of a Venezuelan prisoner by the Kim regime. On September 1967, Alí Lameda, a member of the Venezuelan Communist Party who was working in North Korea translating part of Kim Il Sung’s works to Spanish, was sent to the Sariwon Prison Camp, 65 km south of Pyongyang. Lameda was imprisoned after supposedly addressing Kim Il Sung in “an ironic manner” during a dinner hosted by the Supreme Leader to the translators. He wouldn’t be released until seven years later, in 1974, after Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu interceded before the North Korean government at Carlos Andrés Pérez’s request, and with the condition that Venezuela recognised North Korea’s sovereignty.

It appears that Commie regimes don’t do irony well. Ironic that many of the lefty interlekshuls love irony. 🙂

Trying to understand my mother’s curious advice, turns out, smiling is cultural. Americans smile a lot. But, not so much in the former Soviet Union, where my mother was a guest in their gulag accommodations. I, not withstanding, smile broadly and with dimples.

But, since leftism has gripped the US in the throat, we’re becoming as repressed as Russians looking over their shoulders in the former Soviet Union.

Smiling advice for foreigners currently traveling in Russia, where they are still suspicious of smiling, may now come in handy here:

https://www.hofstede-insights.com/2018/01/08/ask-expert-smile-russia/

Basically, employ a brief, tepid, close mouthed smile— if you must— infrequently. No grinning. Forget about laughing.

Not that it matters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYYVZIuuReo

“Hatcrime” is quite apt. And it seems to me that all this bally-hoo is highly suggestive of some social Big-Brother’s training in turning individuals into automatons, who now reliably and robotically re-create themselves.

I was also struck by the many resemblances of Orwell’s writing to Miss Rand’s. It seems to me I remember her somewhere disparaging the book, but I think they made many of the same points, and sometimes even the phraseology strikes me as similar. Of course, Orwell is looking at the phenomenon from a different angle; he is fundamentally concerned with the stifling of the individual, the killing of the human within the human body, with turning the human into a mechanical robot.

.

But ultimately, the concern of both is to warn us all what can happen unless we encourage ourselves to think for ourselves, to hang onto our humanity and above all to our rational capacity and our individual selves, because in the end that is the only thing that can save each of us from psychic death.

. . .
But eeyore, above, wrote,

During the NBC interview, Savannah Guthrie stated, “There is something aggressive about standing there.” ‘

Reading that, it struck me that this sort of thing is often called “passive-aggressive” behavior. It seems like a month ago, but IIRC in Neo’s first posting on this — this utterly negligible pile of rotting manure — the video she included consisted almost entirely of Mr. Sandmann’s standing there calmly, smiling at the drummer. If I came at that with the sort of mindset that Mizz Guthrie apparently has, I can understand her thinking of his stillness as “aggressive.”

I have always despised that term as being both self-contradictory and a ready-made weapon to be used against others who are putting up a resistance to doing as they’re being told. I HATE it when people are vilified regardless of their actual behavior, conduct, actions; the more so when what they are doing is perfectly normal, acceptable behavior, and also when it consists of resisting an actual, unprovoked attack by either passive compliance aimed at forcing the attacker to cope with manhandling (actually or metaphorically) a deadweight, or by active defensive fighting.

GRRRRRR.

.

Anyway, I said it before and I’ll say it again. Those young men conducted themselves admirably, and with a degree of self-restraint and maturity that should not be disparaged by calls to remember that they are “children.” They are not. They are well along the way to manhood. Some of them may lose their way in the years ahead, but in that incident at least they showed their present mettle.

The leftist mind is extraordinarily sensitive to facial expressions: scanning and re-scanning for any evidence that the leftist is in danger of being disregarded and deprived of what it desires more than anything else … inclusion, access, and a penetrative influence into and control over, the other.

This is the mindset and interpersonal strategy typically expected in a primitive tribe, or a chimp troop, or a thug-ocracy. It’s part of the psychological world of the those who are hypersensitive to the possibility that they may be fatally disregarded, cut out of their share, subject to exclusionary plotting.

It is not the mindset or preoccupation of those inhabiting a classically liberal polity wherein your welfare and life are not – ostensibly – dependent upon a kind of obscene associative arrangement which makes every social act or exchange a potential matter of life and death.

If you own property, if it is protected by law, if you cannot be deprived of access to the freemarket, to free association, and exchange, then this sub-human realm of obsession, falls away behind you.

But, with the left, it never does. The whole point of the left is to reconstruct, or devolve, the assumed anthropology of the classical liberal into the anthropology of the neurotic affirmation seeker, dependent for its existence and meaning on a constant stream of social validations.

In fact the Marxist mind shrugs at natural freedom, considering the primary human problem to be one of alienation. Hence … inclusion … inclusion …. and more inclusion. And we see this all the time, most especially now, in left’s obsession with the “tyranny of biology” (modern feminism); with the supposedly horrible exigencies of the natural world which make freedom meaningless outside a communal life (Marxism); with the “ableism” of the privileged, which now must be sacrificed on the altar of equity and coerced caring.

Natural freedom, political freedom, economic freedom, is not enough: because, apparently, not everyone can be or will be persuaded to make use of it. Because nature is “unfair” we will remake human nature so that all is fair and none are deprived of their “fair” share of the affirmations and especially the sacrifices of others. And part of this is vigilantly scanning the countenance of others so as to alert us if their compliance is formal, grudging, or not fully felt.

And speaking of privilege, what, after all, makes the biological offspring of some social element, more entitled to its support than those who the collective has anointed as equally deserving?

No, you cannot ultimately share a legal space with leftists. They are a bottomless, life sucking pit of resentment.

Kind of like Hell, but without the poetic charms.

It’s great to see 1984 getting its due! I will have to give it a fresh read.