Teaching English in North Korea

The New Neo Posted on by

This article by Suki Kim is an excerpt from her book Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite, based on her experience teaching English in North Korea. From a review of the book in the Chicago Tribune:

Remarkable”¦A deeply unsettling book, offering a rare and disturbing inside glimpse into the strangeness, brutality and claustrophobia of North Korea”¦ Kim’s book is full of small observations that vividly evoke the paranoia and loneliness of a nation living in fear and in thrall to its ‘Great Leaders’”¦Her portraits of her students are tender and heartbreaking, highlighting the enormity of what is at stake.”

Even the small essay conveys much the same picture. It’s a depressing read, but a good description of the totality of mind control in North Korea and the way it stunts the people there.

That, of course, is the goal of the North Korean government. By completely controlling the information that comes in, the rulers are able to fashion a world in which Korea is superior to every nation on earth. We already knew that is what they try to make people think, but the essay manages to describe how it effects young people’s thought processes and makes other ideas almost literally unthinkable. It even keeps the students from understanding the basic concepts behind writing an essay, where one must prove a thesis by marshaling facts.

Read it and weep for the captive minds of North Korea, whose government has managed to realize some of the goals so well described by George Orwell when he wrote about Newspeak in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

Obamacare cost-saving, and Gruber: it’s lies all the way down

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s not forget good old Obamacare. The administration hasn’t, and the lies keep coming:

On Dec. 3, federal actuaries released data showing that health spending inched up only 3.6 percent in 2013.

Marilyn Tavenner, the head of Medicare and Medicaid, boasted that it’s “evidence that our efforts to reform the health-care-delivery system are working.” Sorry, not true.

That 3.6 percent figure is an improvement only by a hair.

The real slowing of health care spending started way back in 2009, in the wake of the Great Recession, long before ObamaCare even passed. Health spending slowed to a comfortable 3.8 percent rise that year, and stayed at that slow pace in 2010.

Not that the president acknowledged that health spending was growing at the slowest rate in a half-century.

To pass his health bill, he needed a crisis. So he and then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius repeatedly lied, warning that costs were “skyrocketing,” spending was “spiraling” out of control and health needs would gobble up ever more GDP unless Congress quickly passed the Affordable Care Act…

On Dec. 2, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced “demonstrable progress” in making hospital care safer.

Her report claims that some 50,000 fewer patients died from bed sores, infections, medication errors, falls and other mishaps from 2010 to 2013, largely due to new payment incentives and a patient safety program in ObamaCare.

That happy claim was repeated verbatim by many media outlets.

Not so fast, say patient safety experts who actually read the report…

There’s another much more subtle lie inherent in the administration’s claims, which is the assumption that if an effect follows an event, the effect is caused by that event. That sort of “lie” is hardly limited to the Obama administration or Obamacare, of course. It’s a common problem with a great deal of social science and medical research—actually, just about any research in the soft rather than hard sciences.

In other, related news, Jonathan Gruber is testifying before Congress today. He is in the unenviable position of having to say he lied about lying but is now telling the truth about his lies about lying. However, Gruber also managed to do what most people cannot or will not do, which is to avoid hedging and qualifying in his apology:

I sincerely apologize both for conjecturing with a tone of expertise and for doing so in such a disparaging fashion. It is never appropriate to try to make oneself seem more important or smarter by demeaning others. I know better. I knew better. I am embarrassed, and I am sorry.

In Gruber’s closing paragraph he tries to say “It’s me, not Obamacare!” He is willing to fall on his sword for the greater good:

I behaved badly, and I will have to live with that, but my own inexcusable arrogance is not a flaw in the Affordable Care
Act.

No, it’s not. But the ACA has its own flaws galore, much greater than Gruber’s. Its proponents had their own inexcusable arrogance, lies, and parliamentary shenanigans, and Obamacare has its own terrible consequences.

[NOTE: By the way, for what it’s worth, when I first heard about Gruber—which was in connection with his highly-praised prediction a year ago that only 3% of Americans will be impacted negatively by Obamacare—I wrote an article for PJ that pointed out Gruber’s partisanship and non-objectivity, plus the fact that he had had to admit there were quite a few flaws in the reasoning behind the models for which he was so well-known. In it, I quoted an Avik Roy article that features a statement Gruber himself had made:

Most importantly, Gruber has admitted that his model has a catastrophic flaw: it can’t model the impact of Obamacare’s requirement that insurers take all comers regardless of pre-existing conditions. Here’s what he said to the State of Colorado:

“It is important to recognize some limitations in our modeling of prices. In particular, given publicly available data we cannot incorporate the effects of the ban on pre-existing conditions exclusions. This ban will cause a rise in premiums as insurers are forced to cover conditions that they had previously excluded. In addition, there are new premium taxes on insurers that will raise premium rates”¦Overall, we cannot predict the net impacts of these factors on premiums without more analysis.”

It’s precisely this aspect of the law that non-partisan analysts have pointed to as a reason why Obamacare will drive up premiums.

Why did anyone ever listen to Gruber? Because he was telling them what they wanted to hear. To use a model that omits the fact that Obamacare required the coverage of people with pre-existing conditions, and to act as though this will have no effect on premiums, is not just incompetent, but shockingly so, as anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of insurance and math could have easily seen.]

[NOTE II: Any attacks on Gruber from the left would be following the same playbook Gruber himself is following: It’s Gruber, not Obamacare! Gruber’s the villain!]

Another great article by a political changer

The New Neo Posted on by

This changer article by Danusha V. Goska is very hard-hitting and well worth reading.

And here’s a companion piece of sorts:

As the political project that exists to vindicate the axiom that all sorts of government program X’s can solve an endless list of social problem Y’s, liberalism is always at risk of descending into prescriptive bullshit. Liberal compassion lends itself to bullshit by subordinating the putative concern with efficacy to the dominant but unannounced imperative of moral validation and exhibitionism. I, the empathizer, am interested in the sufferer for love of myself, Rousseau contended. Accordingly, an ineffectual program may serve the compassionate purposes of its designers and defenders as well as or better than a successful one.

. . .

Conservative critiques of liberalism sometimes concede that liberals’ aspirations are laudable before insisting that the means liberals favor are insufficiently practical and at least potentially destructive. The way liberal compassion lends itself to liberal bullshit, however, argues for a less forgiving interpretation. Liberals’ ideals make them more culpable, not less, for the fact that government programs set up to do good don’t reliably accomplish good. Doing good is often harder than do-gooders realize, but doing good is also more about the doing and the doer than it is about the good. Too often, as a result, liberals are content to treat gestures as the functional equivalent of deeds, and intentions as adequate substitutes for achievements.

Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book about this, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

[NOTE: One thing that Goska’s article reminded me of is that Hillary Clinton is very vulnerable on the whole “how rape victims are treated” issue that’s gotten so much press lately:

Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she’d never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.

A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free. In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton “took me through Hell” and “lied like a dog.”

That may come up again if Hillary runs in 2016.]

Eric Garner’s widow speaks out

The New Neo Posted on by

I think that under the circumstances she’s being quite reasonable, too.

Esaw Garner knows her husband was a petty criminal and doesn’t argue otherwise. What’s more, I give her points for saying this:

I feel like ”” I don’t even feel like it’s a black and white thing, honestly, you know, in my opinion. I really don’t feel like it’s a black and white thing.

Mrs. Garner would have liked to have seen Officer Pantaleo have a day in court, and in that sentiment she is hardly alone, nor is it limited to partisans. It does seem at least arguable that undue force was exerted, considering the pettiness of the offense and the lack of violent resistance on the part of Garner. According to his widow, she had tried to prevent this from happening but failed, and it’s hard not to be sympathetic with her plight:

Eric Garner is seen at the beginning of the video frustrated, complaining that police are always hassling him. He’d been previously arrested for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes.

“They knew him by name. They harassed us. They said things to us. We would go shopping. You know, they ”” hi, cigarette man. Hey, cigarette man and wife. You know, stuff like that,” Esaw said.

“I would just say, I would just keep walking, don’t say anything, don’t respond, you know, don’t give them a reason to do anything to you. And he just felt like ”” but they keep harassing me. And I say, just ignore them, Eric. He said, how much can I ignore them? I would say, just stay away from the block. You know? Just find something else to do.”

Would that he had.

Chris Hughes: crafting a sustainable non-apology

The New Neo Posted on by

In the larger scheme of things, the TNR flap I wrote about Saturday is minor, although it’s part of a more major trend towards intellectually shallow, market-driven, youth-oriented, agenda-based, media.

But I just couldn’t resist fisking this piece of apologia sans apology by Chris Hughes, the youthful owner of TNR who has managed to deeply offend nearly its entire staff, not only by his vision for the future of the magazine, but by the duplicitous and underhanded way in which he treated the editors he was firing.

Beginning with its title, “Crafting a Sustainable New Republic,” which is a model of Newspeak (“crafting” and “sustainable” being the buzzwords du jour), Hughes’ piece is emblematic of how to “craft” a self-serving pile of verbiage that carefully avoids saying anything honest.

Hughes wants to redo the magazine. Fine. But he acts as though what occurred there under his watch somehow just happened through mysterious and inevitable forces of modernization and progress:

Last week, about a dozen members of the editorial staff of the New Republic walked out in protest over new leadership. By their account, this was a clash of cultures : Silicon Valley versus tradition, and everyone must choose a side. I believe this dangerously oversimplifies a debate many journalistic institutions are having today. They were colleagues whom I personally liked and respected, so I was sad to see them go and regret much of how it happened. But the New Republic is too important an institution to accept their departures as its end.

Hughes is the passive observer of their mysterious departure rather than its catalyst. They “walked out in protest over new leadership,” and who was that new leader? A person could read that entire paragraph and not know it was Hughes himself. And although Hughes says it was a dozen members of the editorial staff who left, Hughes is minimizing here because the exodus actually was much larger than that, involving “the resignation of 19 full-time staffers and 31 contributing editors.” That’s 31 out of a total of 38 contributing editors listed, by the way.

Maybe Hughes has as much trouble counting as he reportedly has in dealing with people. It wasn’t just the “Silicon Valley versus tradition” battle that made them all resign; that characterization of Hughes’ “dangerously oversimplifies” what happened, including this:

While the clash was portrayed by Vidra [and Hughes] as new media versus old media, staffers critical of the moves noted that digital talent also quit.

But really, the best example of Hughes’ mealy-mouthed way of referring to what he did and the editors’ reaction to it is this:

I was sad to see them go and regret much of how it happened.

No Hughes action and editor reaction there, just Hughes’ grief (and crocodile tears). What Hughes regrets, no doubt, is that he’s been fingered by the staff as the reason they left, including his heavy-handed, tone-deaf, and insulting way of treating his fellow human beings.

I’ll leave the matter at that, because I’ve probably wasted way too much time on it already. But weasel words masquerading as earnest sincerity raise my hackles. Unfortunately, they are becoming more and more frequent as time goes on.

Here’s my question about the death of The New Republic

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’re going to buy the venerable liberal publication The New Republic only to turn it into a “digital media company,” why bother to buy it at all? Why not just start your own digital media company and leave TNR to limp along and die in peace?

I’m no TNR fan, and I often criticize it on this blog. But it’s long exhibited more intelligence than most liberal publications, and a more robust attitude towards foreign policy. When not-dry-behind-the-ears Facebook wunderkind Chris Hughes purchased it and promised to respect it, did anyone actually believe him? Certainly not this writer, who predicted at the outset that Hughes would end up canning TNR’s longtime editor and columnist Leon Wieseltier, although it took a bit longer than forecast and involved a lot more people than Wieseltier. So many people have as a result quit the magazine in addition to those fired by Hughes that it would make more sense to list the people who appear to be staying than those leaving.

Wieseltier, by the way, is a curious figure, emblematic of TNR’s former place in the liberal pantheon. He was an Obama supporter in 2008, albeit one with reservations. He wrote the following at the time, which shows that he misjudged Obama by giving him far too much credit, and he largely misread him, although not entirely. A tiny warning bell was ringing in Wieseltier’s ears, and the editor, whose Scoop Jacksonesque liberalism is as old-fashioned as the sophisticated flow of his prose, could not entirely ignore it:

Obama is a smart man. He is a decent man. He is an undangerous man, in the manner of all pragmatists and opportunists. He reveres reason, though he often confuses it with conversation. His domestic goals are good, though the titans of American finance, the greedy geniuses of Wall Street, may have made many of those goals fantastic. He will see to it that some liberalism survives at the Supreme Court. This leaves only the rest of the world. What a time for a novice! I dread the prospect of Obama’s West Wing education in foreign policy: even when he spoke well about these matters in the debates, it all sounded so new to him, so light.

Wieseltier is snob enough to hate Sarah Palin (and I think “hate” is really the correct word) but he was also patriot enough to have hated Bill Ayers even more, and distrusted Obama because of his association with him:

I must say that the Ayers affair rankles me, because I would not shake the man’s dirty hand; and the fact that Obama was eight years old at the time of the Weather Underground is no more pertinent to his moral and historical awareness than the fact that he was six years old at the time of the King assassination.

When you read the essay, you can see why newcomers such as Hughes and his henchman Vidra (who used to work for the illustrious Gawker) have no use for Wieseltier’s fussy style or his old-fashioned love of this country. When I read it myself, here in late 2014, it made me wonder what Wieseltier thinks of Obama these days.

This essay from last April gave me the answer, which is that Wieseltier is well aware that the foreign policy prospect he dreaded so much in 2008 has come true:

…[T]he president feels inconvenienced by history. It refuses to follow his program for it. It regularly exasperates him and regularly disappoints him. It flows when he wants it to ebb and it ebbs when he wants it flow. Like Mr. Incredible, the president is flummoxed that the world won’t stay saved, or agree to be saved at all. After all, he came to save it. And so the world has only itself to blame if Obama is sick of it and going home…

…[T]he Obama administration abandons to their fates one people after another, who pay the price for the president’s impatience with large historical struggles. The Ukrainians, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Saudis, the Moldovans, the Poles, the Czechs, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, the Baltic populations: they are all living with the jitters, and some of them on the cusp of despair, because the United States seems no longer reliable in emergencies…

Obama’s impatience with history has left him patient with evil. It is not a pretty sight; but his broken foreign policy is riddled with such ironies…The grim fact is that Obama’s containment is not containing Putin, whose “green men” and “peoples’ republics” and Big Lies and Russophilic incitement and covert operations and military deployments are undeterred by it. While Obama pitches the “off-ramp,” Putin revels in the on-ramp. Geneva is now the world capital of failure. The only country that American containment is containing is America.

…But the richest of the ironies about Obama’s foreign policy is this: the world that in his view wanted to be rid of American salience now longs for it…There are many places in the world where we are despised not for taking action but for not taking action. Our allies do not trust us. Our enemies do not fear us. What if American preeminence is good for the world and good for America?

It’s worth reading in its entirety, much like that earlier essay of Wieseltier’s. There are many rich ironies, and one of them is that Wieselthier voted for Obama in 2008, and thought him an “undangerous” man.

Taking rape allegations seriously

The New Neo Posted on by

The WaPo has some words on the UVA rape story’s unraveling and the lessons we should take from it:

As the doubts and discrepancies are sorted out, here are some truths that must not get lost: Sexual assault, often associated with excessive alcohol consumption, is a scourge that, for far too long, has not been taken seriously enough by colleges and universities. The critical work of putting in place a system that effectively and fairly investigates allegations of sexual assaults, supports victims and provides for due process must continue with even more urgency…

The University of Virginia is certainly no exception to those truths, as its officials have acknowledged in recent days. The fact that it apparently never expels students for sexual assault, the outpouring of complaints from other students and the federal investigation of the school for possible noncompliance with Title IX equal rights protections all point to a serious problem.

To the university’s credit, it responded to Friday’s revelations with exactly the right message. “Despite doubts that have been cast on the Rolling Stone story, we need to keep our eyes on the prize, which is nothing less than zero tolerance for rape,” said Helen Dragas, a member of the university’s governing Board of Visitors. “Our primary concern must be for the well-being of our students. We need to get this right for them, and do so with no hesitation or concern for image.”

Zero tolerance for rape? Isn’t that already in place, if the rape is proven? What does the assertion that the university “apparently never expels students for sexual assault” actually mean? I cannot imagine—although correct me if I’m wrong—that if a UVA student is convicted of rape that the student is not expelled. My guess is that what is meant by the statement is that students accused of rape are not expelled for mere accusations, as long as the charges are unproven.

University-run procedures are not enough to provide protection for the accused; I would prefer that these sorts of accusations be dealt with by the criminal justice system. But if universities must be involved, taking rape seriously does not mean believing every accusation. I say this as a woman, and as someone who is completely against rape. But I also say this as a person who is aware that false accusations exist, and that each case stands alone and most be proved or disproved based on its fact situation rather than the word of one person or another taken as an article of faith.

It strikes me, on reading about this case and its fallout on many websites, that many people on the left approach rape as an either/or proposition. Their thought process is something like this: we believe that women tell the truth about rape, but if one woman (such as Jackie) is proven to have lied, that means that all women are now suspect and the right will regard them all as liars. That’s identity politics as the left practices it; people placed in categories and lumped together by that classification.

But each woman is an individual telling a story that may or may not be true, which must be evaluated on its own according to to the facts of the case rather than some pre-conceived notions of who is telling the truth and who lying based on his/her gender. That is the only way to take rape allegations seriously, and to honor the rights of both accuser and accused. That would seem obvious, but it’s not at all obvious to the left.

Hostage Luke Somers killed during rescue attempt

The New Neo Posted on by

Sad news:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that Somers and the other hostage, later identified as South African Pierre Korkie, were “murdered by AQAP [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] terrorists during the course of the operation.”

Somers, 33, appeared late Wednesday in a hostage video put online by AQAP in which the terror group said they were going to kill him in three days if their demands — unspecified in the video — were not met. Days before that, a team of U.S. Navy SEALs, along with Yemeni commandos, had attempted to rescue Somers in a raid similar to Friday’s, but he had been moved to another location.

The U.S. government found Somers again, however, and launched the second rescue attempt at 1 a.m. local time Saturday, a senior administration official told ABC News.

The special operations team infiltrated first by Osprey aircraft and then on foot, a defense official said.

But working in difficult, mountainous terrain, the 40-man team was met with gunfire, according to the administration official. During the firefight, one of the AQAP fighters went into the compound holding the hostages just ahead of the American forces. By the time the Americans arrived, both Somers and Korkie had been shot. The commandos got Somers and Korkie out but medics were unable to save them.

We have become used to successful rescue attempts, but that means we can lose sight of how extraordinarily difficult and risky they are to pull off. In this case, it’s also hard if not impossible to know what really happened, because it’s not the sort of thing about which the government would be revealing a lot of details about what went wrong.

If we take the report at face value, however, it appears that someone most likely tipped off the kidnappers about the rescue operation, which gave AQAP time to murder their captives. Does anyone doubt they would do that, if they had warning and time?

This Reuters article has a bit more information, which may or may not be correct:

A U.S. official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said American special forces had conducted the operation alone at 1 a.m. in Yemen, but that the kidnappers had been alerted to their approach shortly before they arrived…

Yemen’s government said in a statement carried on state media that its security forces had led the raid. It said the security forces had surrounded the house and called on the kidnappers to surrender, but they instead shot the hostages.

That led to an assault on the building in which four Yemeni security officers were also wounded, it said.

So, which is it? Reuters doesn’t know, nor do I. But both reports indicate (to me at least) that the kidnappers were most likely tipped off by someone in Yemen who was aware of the plans.

The Reuters article also mentions that the South African hostage who was killed was supposedly, according to the Gift of the Givers relief group, about to be freed on Sunday because they had successfully negotiated for his release. My guess is that, if that is true, it was because a hefty ransom had been paid (the US does not allow this for our hostages, but many other countries do). But whether or not the promise of release was actually going to be carried out or not is impossible to know.

I’m somewhat inclined to give the Obama administration a break on this one, because of the inherent difficulty of such operations. It is better to attempt a rescue and fail than to allow hostages to be murdered after reciting words given to them by their captors, and their deaths and/or dead bodies videotaped and spread around the world for propaganda purposes.

It is, of course, far better for the rescues to be successful, but realistically speaking that is not going to happen 100% of the time.

RIP Luke Somers and Pierre Korkie, and condolences to their grieving families.